This, of course, is more critical in some vertical markets than in others – like the financial sector where microseconds can make a difference of millions of dollars made or lost. So implementing 10-Gigabit Ethernet in your equipment access layer of your data center can seriously reduce the amount of time data takes to get from initiator to destination. It also obviously has the capability of 10 times the throughput- provided that your switches can support line-rate (their backplanes can handle 10Gb/s). Inherently, 10-Gigabit Ethernet has 1/5 the latency that Gigabit Ethernet does. What really happens when you add a ToR switch is that you get higher data rates closer to the servers, so there is an appearance that latency was decreased, when in actuality, it’s just the data moving faster for a longer period of time. Latency and throughput: Switch manufacturers touted that adding ToR would lower latency, but that is a bit misleading.This also helps with cable management throughout the data center.

Cable reduction: The cable from the server to the switch is less then three meters and the connections get aggregated in the ToR switch, so the cables running outside the rack get reduced by at least a factor of eight.In addition to incremental growth, data center managers started implementing ToR switches for a number of other reasons: However, about seven years ago, with the introduction of 10G connections into the data center, topologies started to change. Until fairly recently, data centers were designed with dedicated racks in mind – server, storage, and switch racks. Now, the trending architecture of the data center network has changed to all but eliminate end-of-row (EoR) switches in favor of ToR. ToR designs originally popped up because data center managers ran out of room on their aggregation switches, so they needed to add incremental capacity. With the advent of top-of-rack (ToR) switching and SFP+ direct-attach copper cables, more data centers are able to quickly implement cost-effective 10G-and-beyond connections. Top 10 Suppliers Series – European Survey.

Tor switch vs core switch