Cisco Data Center Design

Hey folks! How you doing?!

In today's posts we will design our Data Center as if the company that we should use was Cisco.

The technology used by Cisco for the Data Center Technology is the Nexus Family. This devices are deployed in order to design and build Data Centers in a quick and efficient way. In the other hand, and related to security, he find that security in data centers is provided by the ASA Family of firewalls. This firewalls even have protection in the 7th layer of the OSI tower, which is provided by filtering per application.

As it show in the figure below, a Cisco Nexus 9500 will be used in the Data Center for the Spine layer, and a Cisco Nexus 9300 will be used in the Leaf layer of the Data Center.

Cisco Nexus 9336PQ

This switches can work in both architectures mode: spine and leaf, but it is well-known for its good performance in the Leaf layer. This is a 32 port switch, with interfaces that can work on 10 or 40 Gbps mode, with a final throughtput of 2,88 Tbps.

Cisco Nexus 9516

The Nexus 9516 it's a really powerful switch with to main characteristics: high resiliency, and big array of 1/10/40 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces. It can make throughout the most demanding requirements, from the enterprise through Internet Service Provider, to Data Center requirements. It has an overall throughput of 60 Tbps.

Cisco ASA 5585-X

This firewall satisfies the necessities of companies in terms of security, securing its Data Centers, providing up to 8 times  the throughput density, 2 times more of connections capacity and up to 4 times connection capacity, compared to any convencional firewall.

One of the many key points that Cisco has in its own Data Center architecture, is the fact that all this devices are ruled by the same OS, which simplifies the management of all of them. Also, compatibility between devices is a good point to take into account.