The more ports you have in aggregation switches, the more likely you are to face potential scalability constraints. These switches demand higher port densities in the aggregation switches, even if there is a single connection to each redundant aggregation switch. In a large data center with many racks, a Top of Rack design can quickly become a management burden by adding many switches to the data center that are each individually managed. One significant drawback of the Top of Rack design is the increased management domain. Given that servers connect with very short copper cables within the rack, there is more flexibility and options in terms of what that cable is and how fast of a connection it can support. Any network upgrades or issues with the rack switches will generally only affect the servers within that rack, not an entire row of servers. In the Top of Rack design, servers connect to one or two Ethernet switches installed inside the rack so that all copper cabling for servers stays within the rack (from the server to the rack switch). Therefore, there is no need for an expensive infrastructure of copper cabling running between racks and throughout the data center. The Ethernet switch links the rack to the data center network with fiber running directly from the rack to a common aggregation area.Įach rack can be treated and managed like an individual and modular unit within the data center. In this post, we will mainly discuss the differences between these two approaches. Top of Rack (ToR) and End of Row (EoR) are two common infrastructure designs for data centers.

End of row vs tor switch