Data Centers architecture design. Which to choose?

Hey folks! How you doing?

The post before, we were talking about guidelines for a good Data Center design. We recommend you to have a glance at it.

By the way, today we wanna show you the different architecture designs used for building a Data Center. We are going to explain the generic ones, even different brand solutions (Juniper). Then, we will discuss each topic, focussing on the benefits and disadvantages of them.  Afterwards, we will decide which best fits to our bank data center project.

Firstly, the generic architecture designs most widely used:

The traditional 2-Tier

Features:

• Collapsed backbone architecture.
• Single L2 domain.
• L2/L3 redundant core switches and L2 access switches
• Scale the network with additional access switches.

The image below shows how it looks a traditional 2-Tier

The traditional 3-Tier

Features:

• Multi-layer hierarchical arquitecture.
• Redundant L3 core switches, redundant L2/L3 aggregation switches and L2 access switches.
• L2 domain is isolated to individual aggregation block.
• Implement route summarization at the aggregation layer.
• Scale the network with additional aggregation blocks.

The image below shows how it looks a traditional 3-Tier

Time to talk about brands architecture design. We have found three different implementations from Juniper. As we don't want to bore you, we will explain this part focussing only in the implementation that best fits our bank requirements. CAPMUN always takes care of its friends, so we will provide you links for the other solutions, in case you need to know more about this.

Virtualized IT Data Center

Features:

• Compute and Virtualization
• Layer 2 and Layer 3 Protocols
• Application Load Balancer
• High Availability
• Open, it can interact with other vendors devices.
• Smart workload mobility with automated orchestration and template-based provisioning

You can see an image of how it looks.

Enterprise Private Cloud Data Center

You can know more on the link attached: Juniper data center arquitecture for private cloud enterprises

Virtualized IT Data Center with Orchestration

Know more here: Juniper data center arquitecture for Virtualized IT

As the banking sector demands high availability services and they work with critical data, we have chosen Virtualized IT Data Center as it fits best with our requirements. On the other hand, the second and third solution don't satisfy the necessities.

Finally, it is time to discuss about the benefits and disadvantages of these three solutions.

The traditional 2-tier is the cheapest one, as we don't have to spend lot of money in the equipment. It has a collapsed core, so this means, buying half devices. Problems will come if we need to expand our network and the likelihood of changing the core would be higher.

The traditional 3-tier has the advantage of no need of change the core, we have different devices that perform some other tasks, like the aggregation layer. Also it is possible to have more redundancy, rather than with the 2-tier. The problem of this solution is quite simple. Price. It is very expensive, as we need to buy lot of equipment in order to have this deployment done.

Last one, Virtualized IT Data Center. This solution is very related to 3-tier, as it has the same structure. So it has the same benefits and disadvantages, but adds virtualized environment. This improves the solution quite a lot.

The verdict

The best Data Center architecture solution for us, is Virtualized IT, as it provides high availability for business-critical applications. A bank always works with this kind of critical traffic, so it is a must to never be in a down state. A costumer will become angry if he/she cannot access to his/her bank account. Also if it is doing a purchase, he/she will not be allowed to pay the product is another huge problem. Therefore, we need to put all the efforts in order to achieve this need. Never having services down.