The data center is home to the computational power, storage, and applications necessary to support an enterprise business. The data center infrastructure is central to the IT architecture, from which all content is sourced or passes through. Cloud Connectiv knows proper planning of the data center infrastructure design is critical, and performance, resiliency, and scalability need to be carefully considered.

Maximizing Business Potential

Another important aspect of the data center design is flexibility in quickly deploying and supporting new services. Designing a flexible architecture that has the ability to support new applications in a short time frame can result in a significant competitive advantage. Such a design requires solid initial planning and thoughtful consideration in the areas of port density, access layer uplink bandwidth, true server capacity, and oversubscription, to name just a few. Cloud Connectiv’s subject matter experts have deployed new data centers across the globe.

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Connected Globally, Quickly, Securely

The data center network design is based on a proven layered approach, which has been tested and improved over the past several years in some of the largest data center implementations in the world. The layered approach is the basic foundation of the data center design that seeks to improve scalability, performance, flexibility, resiliency, and maintenance.

Sustaining Your Infrastructure

The Cisco Nexus® 9300-EX platform is the next generation of fixed Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches. The new platform, based on Cisco’s Cloud Scale ASIC supports cost-effective cloud-scale deployments, an increased number of endpoints, and cloud services with wire-rate security and telemetry. The platform is built on modern system architecture designed to provide high performance to meet the evolving needs of highly scalable data centers and growing enterprises. Cisco Nexus 9300-EX platform switches offer a variety of interface options to transparently migrate existing data centers from 100-Mbps, 1-Gbps, and 10-Gbps speeds to 25 Gbps at the server, and from 10- and 40-Gbps speeds to 50 and 100 Gbps at the aggregation layer.

The platform provides investment protection for customers, delivering large buffers, immense Layer 2 and Layer 3 scalability, and performance to meet the changing needs of highly virtualized, automated cloud environments in data centers. The platform hardware supports Cisco® Data Center Interconnect (DCI) features, enabling flexible workload mobility and LAN and SAN convergence.

The platform has the capability to collect comprehensive Cisco Tetration Analytics™ telemetry information at line rate across all the ports without adding any latency to the packets or negatively affecting switch performance. This telemetry information is exported every 100 milliseconds by default directly from the switch’s application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC). This information consists of three types of data:

● Flow information: This information contains information about endpoints, protocols, ports, when the flow started, how long the flow was active, etc.
● Interpacket variation: This information captures any interpacket variations within the flow. Examples include variation in time to live (TTL), IP and TCP flags, payload length, etc.
● Context details:Context information is derived outside the packet header, including variation in buffer utilization, packet drops within a flow, association with tunnel endpoints, etc.

The Cisco Tetration Analytics platform consumes this telemetry data, and by using unsupervised machine learning and behavior analysis it can provide outstanding pervasive visibility across everything in your data center in real time. By using algorithmic approaches, the Cisco Tetration Analytics platform provides a deep application insights and interactions, enabling dramatically simplified operations, a zero-trust model, and migration of applications to any programmable infrastructure. To learn more, go to http://www.cisco.com/go/tetration.
Cisco provides two modes of operation for Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches. Organizations can use Cisco NX OS Software to deploy the switches in standard Cisco Nexus switch environments (NX-OS mode). Organizations also can use a hardware infrastructure that is ready to support the Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI™) platform to take full advantage of an automated, policy-based, systems-management approach (ACI mode).

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The Cisco Nexus 9300-EX platform provides the following features and benefits:

● High performance and scalability
◦ The platform provides wire-rate Layer 2 and 3 switching on all ports.
◦ Robust system specifications support complex applications and features such as a quad-core CPU with 24 GB of system memory and a 64-GB solid-state disk (SSD) drive.
◦ The 40-MB buffer supports highly scalable data centers and big data applications.
● Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN)
◦ The platform offers native line-rate VXLAN routing.
◦ The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) Ethernet Virtual Private Network (EVPN) control plane provides scalable multitenancy and host mobility (refer to VXLAN Network with MP-BGP EVPN Control Planefor more information).
● Hardware and software high availability
◦ Virtual port-channel (vPC) technology provides Layer 2 multipathing through the elimination of Spanning Tree Protocol. It also enables fully utilized bisectional bandwidth and simplified Layer 2 logical topologies without the need to change the existing management and deployment models.
◦ The 64-way equal-cost multipath (ECMP) routing enables the use of Layer 3 fat-tree designs. This feature helps organizations prevent network bottlenecks, increase resiliency, and add capacity with little network disruption.
◦ Advanced reboot capabilities include hot and cold patching.
◦ The switches use hot-swappable power-supply units (PSUs) and fans with N+1 redundancy.
● Purpose-built Cisco NX-OS Software operating system with comprehensive, proven innovations
◦ Open programmability supports built-in DevOps automation tools such as Puppet, Chef, and Ansible.
◦ Cisco NX-API supports a common programmatic approach across Cisco Nexus switches.
◦ Power-on autoprovisioning (POAP) enables touchless bootup and configuration of the switch, drastically reducing provisioning time.
◦ Cisco Embedded Event Manager (EEM) and Python scripting enable automation and remote operations in the data center.
◦ Advanced buffer monitoring reports real-time buffer use per port and per queue, which allows organizations to monitor traffic bursts and application traffic patterns.
◦ Complete Layer 3 unicast and multicast routing protocol suites are supported, including BGP, Open Shortest Path First (OSPF), Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (EIGRP), Routing Information Protocol Version 2 (RIPv2), Protocol Independent Multicast sparse mode (PIM-SM), Source-Specific Multicast (SSM), and Multicast Source Discovery Protocol (MSDP).
◦ Segment routing allows the network to forward Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) packets and engineer traffic without Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP) traffic engineering (TE). It provides a control-plane alternative for increased network scalability and virtualization.
◦ Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE**) N-Port Virtualization (NPV) support enables the network administrator to control domain IDs and points of management on a Fibre Channel network as it scales. This feature enables LAN and SAN converged networks on a lossless, reliable Ethernet network.
◦ Network traffic monitoring with Cisco Nexus Data Broker builds simple, scalable, and cost-effective network test access points (TAPs) and Cisco Switched Port Analyzer (SPAN) aggregation for network traffic monitoring and analysis.
◦ Automate the time-consuming tasks of creating, installing, and maintaining appropriate fabricwide switch configurations with the new Cisco Nexus Fabric Manager.

Location, Location, Location

Choosing a colocation provider away from a city or data center hub with optimal connectivity options – both to the capital, Europe and further afield – means having the advantages of all central data centers with the added benefits of having attractive power capabilities and the security of being away from centrally targeted terrorist activity. Out-of-town colocation providers allow businesses to take full advantage of the capital’s infrastructure without the premium costs associated with it.

A colocation solution provides companies with a variety of opportunities, with exceptional SLAs and having data secured off-site, providing organizations with added levels of risk management and the chance to invest in better equipment and state-of-the-art servers. This can enable IT teams the possibility to explore options such as virtualization and condense the amount of racks and servers required.
Colocation providers are able to meet business requirements at a lower cost than if the service was kept in-house. Data centers and colocation providers have the ability to have businesses up and running within hours, as well as provide the flexibility to grow alongside your organization. Colocation space, power, bandwidth and connection speeds can all be increased where required to ensure that all sizes of colocation clients can be catered to.

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1 Scalability
Did your computing needs shoot up overnight? Or did they drop drastically during your slow season? Instead of having to hire — or fire — new staff or purchase more equipment to handle it yourself, you can just make a call to your colocation provider and scale your service up or down as needed.

2 Connectivity
Colocation providers keep your servers in climate-controlled data centers, with high bandwidth speeds, and excellent redundancy for network connections. You won’t have to pay the costs to purchase and maintain this kind of IT infrastructure in your own offices, and your internal IT staff can focus on other business operations.

3 Security
Quality colocation providers house your servers in secure data centers, with security measures that include biometric scanners, closed circuit cameras, on-site security, coded access, alarm systems, and more. And with colocation, you

don’t have to hire or purchase any of these security measures yourself — it’s all included in your service plan.

4 Stability
If you have to move offices, or are hit with a power outage, or suffer a natural disaster, you won’t have to worry about your data or services going down. A colocation provider will have multiple backup generators and contingencies in place to ensure that there is never an interruption in service, for you, or for your customers.

5 Predictability
Not only does using a colocation provider often save money, but it also turns unpredictable capital outlays into predictable monthly expenses.  You only pay for your own equipment, not a whole datacenter.  Your company will be able to budget for IT needs and allocate existing resources more efficiently.