Juniper meets our Network Requirements

Hello everyone, in today's post we are going to explain how are we going to approach the requirements of the network of our Data Center. First of all we have to keep in mind that we are going to use Juniper Products in our Data Center. As we mentioned in our previous blogs, our objective is to design a data center for a Financial Entity so we have to think about high availability, load balancing and fault-tolerancy when choosing the solutions. Juniper has designed a really interesting architecture called QFabric. The QFabric is composed by different elements that work together as they were just a single switch. This system works as one big unit that provides high availability and full connectivity between all the elements that are part of the network. There are two different models of QFabric technology:

QFX3000-M QFabric System

Designed for average sized Data Centers. It supports up to 768 ports working at 10GbE.

QFX3000-G QFabric System

Designed for large enterprises, service providers and cloud data centers. It supports up to 6144 ports working at 10GbE. We are going to choose the QFX3000-G QFabric System because we are dealing with a Financial Entity that must provide service to a huge number of users and have to be able to handle a lot of different applications. The QFabric system is composed by three different types of devices:

QFabric Nodes:

This nodes are the ones placed at the edge of the network, that will connect to all the data center devices. In a regular Data Center topology we would have called them access switches.

QFabric Interconnect:

This devices have high-speed transport capabilities and they are used to interconnect all the QFabric Nodes in a full-mesh topology. The full-mesh topology that is implemented with this devices will provide high availability and resiliency to the system.

QFabric Director:

Well, the name of this device speaks for itself... The QFabric Director devices will be in charge of the management and control of all the elements that are in the topology. The QFabric Director will segregate production segments from the rest of the Data Center and will manage the balance of the traffic that will travel across the network.     So, this was a brief explanation of what will be our go-to products when designing the Data Center. See you in future posts!