
The objective of the Unified Fabric is to build highly available, highly secure network fabrics. The Cisco Nexus product family is a key component of the Cisco unified data center architecture, which is the Unified Fabric. With these characteristics, spine-leaf has become the de facto architecture of network engineers and architects for their next wave of data center architectures. Spine-leaf also uses routing with equal-cost multipathing to allow for all links to be active with higher availability during link failures.


Just to name a few benefits, a spine-leaf design scales horizontally through the addition of spine switches which add availability and bandwidth, which a spanning tree network cannot do.
