Pronto Deployment

One of the earliest structured deployments of Aether was as a part of Pronto project.

The topology used in Pronto is a 2x2 Leaf-Spine (without pairing), which provide Spine redundancy, but does not support dual-homing of devices.

2x2 Leaf-Spine (without pairing) topology

The specific deployment includes a production cluster with multiple servers and a 2x2 leaf-spine fabric, along with a secondary development cluster with it’s own servers and fabric switch, as shown in this diagram:

Logical Network Diagram

5x Fabric Switches (4 in a 2x2 fabric for production, 1 for development)

7x Compute Servers (5 for production, 2 for development):

These servers are configured with:

  • 2x Intel Xeon 5220R CPUs, each with 24 cores, 48 threads

  • 384GB of DDR4 Memory, made up with 12x 16GB ECC DIMMs

  • 2TB of nVME Flash Storage

  • 2x 6TB SATA Disk storage

  • 2x 40GbE ports using an XL710QDA2 NIC

The 1U servers additionally have:

  • 2x 1GbE copper network ports

  • 2x 10GbE SFP+ network ports

The 2U servers have:

  • 4x 1GbE copper network ports

1x Management Switch: HP/Aruba 2540 Series JL356A.

1x Management Server: Supermicro 5019D-FTN4, configured with:

  • AMD Epyc 3251 CPU with 8 cores, 16 threads

  • 32GB of DDR4 memory, in 2x 16GB ECC DIMMs

  • 1TB of nVME Flash storage

  • 4x 1GbE copper network ports

For Pronto, the primary reseller ONF and Stanford used was ASA (aka “RackLive”). for servers and switches, with radio equipment purchased directly from Sercomm.

Pronto BoM Table

Quantity

Type

Description/Use

5

P4 Fabric Switch

2x2 topology, plus 1 development switch

1

Management Switch

Must be Layer 2/3 capable

1

Management Server

2x 40GbE QSFP ports recommended

5

1U Compute Servers

2

2U Compute Servers

6

100GbE QSFP DAC cable

Between Fabric switches

14

40GbE QSFP DAC cable

Between Compute, Management, and Fabric Switch

2

QSFP to 4x SFP+ DAC

Split cable between Fabric and eNB

2

eNB

2

10GbE to 1GbE Media converter

Required unless using switch to convert from fabric to eNB

2

PoE+ Injector

Required unless using a PoE+ Switch

Sufficient

Cat6 Network Cabling

Between all equipment, for management network