Thinking about Data Center Solutions

Engineers from La Salle-URL share the latest news and projects in the field of network solutions in telematic engineering.

07 March 2016 | Posted by Redacción Data Center

LAN Requirements & Solutions

Welcome again!!! In today's post we will talk about the LAN requirements and the possible solutions that we can apply to our case study (a Data Center for a bank), focussing on the enterprise assigned to us to take care of the LAN environment: Dell.

We have several requirements to achieve, but today we'll be dealing with only some of them:

  • Redundancy on all the equipment
  • Complete isolation between our data, applications, services... and the Internet
  • A separate pre-production environment to work and test upgrades without messing with the performance of the users
  • Equipment with links at 10Gb, with the capability to grow up to 40Gb in the future.

 

This week came to our class  David Angulo, Senior Networking & Security consultor on Unitronics. He talked us about the latest tendencies when designing the network infrastructure of a data center, and also introduced us to couple of cases that he had worked and developed.

Among a lot of interesting things that he explained to us (and we want to thank him for his time and patience with us), we want to focus on two ideas: a designing method based on Building Blocks and Trill.

-The idea behind Building Blocks design is to create on our LAN, separated zones to take care of each one of the services that we need. How can we achieve that? One solution is for example to use SDNs. Using SDN and the proper equipment we can create separated areas with "virtual" isolation between them.
You can find more intel into SDNs on this post.

-Trill is an IETF standard stands for ("Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links"). Is a protocol that allows us to multipath all of our equipment with high efficiency. It was created to replace STP (Spanning Tree) on Data Center like environments. Cisco's "Trill" version is called FabricPath, and Dell's is Dell Networking Active Fabric. You can find more intel on this page.
Using Dell Networking Active Fabric we can design a high redundancy LAN with capability to grow and scale over time.

ActiveFabric

 

DELL solutions

So at the end, we have to use all the items above and look for an equipment that can take care of all of them on Dell's catalog.

We found one link where Dell talks about the different strategies when designing a DC, here you can take a look on it.

The final solution is to use the Dell's S-Series Managed Switches, devices that support Active Fabric and work at 1/10/40Gb so meets our link speed requirement. This series provides us and support Top-of-rack, Midle-of-row, and End-of-row connectivity, so we can implement all the LAN structure.

S-Series

 

This has been all for today, we still have some requirements to treat, but on next posts we will deal and focus on them.

As always, stay tuned to the new posts to learn more, and have a nice week!!!

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