Hello everyone out there. It’s me again.

For more than 30 years the Spanning-Tree Protocol accompanied us through thick and thin along the datacenters. Network requirements also increased together with business requirements, and they become very high. So high that a loss of connectivity of a few seconds (due Spanning-Tree convergence) may have a huge impact in the productivity of our environment. We also should not forget about the ports in blocking state becomming an unused port of bandwidth within the network.

This is how Spanning-Tree helped us to solve many of the problems we had in the network.

In the picture below you can see 15 links accross the network. But only five are being used, the rest of the links will be in blocking state at one end of the connection.

Therefore a few new drafts (Around 2010) has been increated in order to overcome this difficulties. One of them is FabricPath.

Some of the befenits of FP:

• ECMP
• No bandwidth restrictions due a sub-optimal path
• more granular traffic engineering