Regional Council Data Centre Modernisation

18th January 2018 | In Business Transformation

Our client, a council, had a requirement to refresh their data centre infrastructure from legacy Cisco to modern data centre architecture.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

Our client needed to upgrade their top of rack switches in the data centres. They had a lot of legacy switches with suboptimal connectives running on legacy technologies. They needed to condense this into a modern scalable data centre architecture that increases operational efficiency and enhance performance.

BUSINESS SOLUTIONS

As part of our business transformation roadmap, following consultation and a network audit, we designed a high-level solution to build a scalable DC architecture deploying state of the art technologies and platform in the data centre arena. Traditionally, data centres have used Layer 2 technologies. As the design of these data centres evolves to scale out multitenant networks, a new data centre architecture is needed that decouples the underlay network from a tenant overlay network with technologies such as Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN). Using a Layer 3 IP-based underlay coupled with a VXLAN-EVPN overlay, our client could deploy much larger networks than are otherwise possible with traditional L2 Ethernet-based architectures. With overlays, endpoints (servers or virtual machines) can be placed anywhere in the network and remain connected to the same logical L2 network, enabling the virtual topology to be decoupled from the physical topology.

SOLUTION PROPOSAL AND BENEFITS

Hardware Group was involved to propose the best of breed data centre network. Hardware Services have worked closely with our client’s employees to precisely record the existing requirements as well as future vision. A data centre proposal was generated and presented to our client based on Juniper Networks high-performance and highly versatile QFX10K switches built on custom Juniper-designed Q5 ASICs positioned as spines. QFX10000 switches are powered by the Juniper Q5 forwarding ASIC, which provides up to 1 Tbps of forwarding capacity along with unprecedented logical scale. This unique blend of high I/O capacity and high logical scale is what truly differentiates the QFX10000 switches, enabling them to solve a variety of traditional data centre challenges. This is in addition to QFX5100 and QFX5110 switches positioned as leaves, enables universal building blocks for data centre switching architectures, allowing users to easily adapt as requirements change over time. This best of breed hardware proposal is designed to run the latest data centre technologies. Accordingly, the design proposal is based on L3 fabric deploying EVPN/VXLAN technology.