I-Fabric Components

An I-Fabric integrates individually managed discontinuous networks, servers, and infrastructure devices into a coordinated, automated fabric. This fabric enables easy management, deployment, and redeployment of logical server farms. An I-Fabric is made up of three functional areas:

• Control plane

• Fabric layer

• Resource pool

Control Plane

The control plane provides intelligence, management, and control of an I-Fabric. N1 Provisioning Server software, which provides the intelligence that enables an I-Fabric, resides within the control plane. The control plane consists of N1 Provisioning Server software, the Control Center server software, and the associated server hardware on which the software is deployed.

Fabric Layer

The fabric layer is a highly integrated Ethernet environment based on industry-standard networking technologies. The fabric layer contains the networking infrastructure and switching fabric that ties the control plane and resource pool together.

Resource Pool

The resource pool consists of infrastructure resources, such as Sun Fire^TM B1600 Blade System Chassis, load balancer blades, and server blades that function as resource pool servers for deployment to server farms. The resource pool of an I-Fabric contains all resource pool servers capable of being provisioned to a farm.