CPD Project

This last talk, presented by Victor Onate, dealt with the process of building a corporate data center.
Once this type of project is assigned to a specific number of engineers, it is divided into five main phases: the ideation phase, the design phase, the implementation phase, the testing and certification part and, finally, the transition to production.

First of all, Victor has explained in detail what the ideation process consists of. It is in this part where the purpose of the data center is defined and what are the reasons for creating it. From here, estimations are made of both the physical resources that will be required for their implementation, as well as the total duration of the project.
The aim is to identify the client's needs for an economic proposal with a project plan for the subsequent execution of the project.
It will then move on to the design phase where the engineers in charge of the project will have to decide what architecture the data center will follow. The documents called High Level Design (HLD) and Bill Of Materials (BOM) are generated a posteriori. These documents explain, respectively, the infrastructure that will be deployed and the list of materials needed to carry it out. They are of great importance as they will prevent unexpected changes in future phases.
The different blocks that will form part of the data center are also defined, such as DMZ, Browsing or Cloud Connect. This last one allows connection to data centers in the cloud and is likely to be used more frequently in the future.

The third phase would be the implementation phase, also known as the Network Implementation Plan (NIP). This follows what is specified in the LLD and creates the device configuration templates. In addition, the test plan is built to validate requirements, racking and wiring is done, an underestimated but very important process to avoid future problems, and finally staging is done where the initial basic configurations of the devices are carried out.

In order to be able to verify the test plan defined above, we move on to the testing phase. Once it is verified that it works properly, the internal certification achieves the validation of the requirements and ensures that the certification department is in compliance with the results delivered.
There is also the possibility for an external company to audit the work done and thus ensure external certification. It compares what is included in the LLD with what has been applied, as well as analyzing vulnerabilities and conducting security audits.
Basically, the goal of this phase is to ensure that the project built is in compliance with the requirements set by the client.

Finally, the production phase is completed with the aim of delivering the project working properly to the service team so that they can operate the infrastructure safely. When the integration is performed, a monitoring is performed, hardening to follow the security policies of the equipment requested by the customer, the equipment inventory, backup policies, etc.

It is important to note that the work does not end at this point. There are different proposals for improving the data center presented. The aim is to improve the procedures or architecture used, such as automating devices using management configuration tools such as Ansible or Chef to make it a much easier infrastructure to manage, use a multicloud architecture or use an Application Discovery Dependency Map (ADDM) solution to ensure that applications work optimally by discovering and mapping dependencies between applications.