Networking

Data Center Spine-Leaf Architecture

Network Design diagram · made in Skemio

Spine-leaf network diagram with two spine switches interconnected to three leaf switches, routing down to compute servers and storage racks.
Spine-leaf network diagram with two spine switches interconnected to three leaf switches, routing down to compute servers and storage racks.
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What it shows

  • Every leaf connects to every spine, creating zero inter-spine connections.
  • Predictable 2-hop latency across all east-west server communication.
  • ECMP routing replaces Spanning Tree, using 100% of available link capacity.

The takeaway

Spine-leaf networks replace oversubscribed vertical hierarchies with flat, deterministic east-west scale.

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