Network Infrastructure
The Imtech Data Center Infrastructure Solutions reduce the total cost of network ownership by introducing a new and innovative network architecture.
The architectural innovations delivered via a high- performance product portfolio significantly reduce not only the cost and complexity of acquiring and managing the network infrastructure, but also the time taken to deploy new applications and services. This portfolio of routing, switching, and security products use a single network operating system-Juniper Networks JUNOS® Software-and is managed by a single network management system. The improved simplicity, agility, and efficiency provided by these solutions, benefit businesses ranging from enterprises of varying sizes to government agencies and service providers.
The Imtech Data Center Infrastructure Solutions simplify data center security and network design. By collapsing the multiple switching tiers present in traditional architectures, the new simplified network design requires fewer devices and interconnections—leading to improved efficiencies in space, power, cooling, and management. This reduction in equipment and improved performance with high availability (HA) is achieved by combining Virtual Chassis technology with line-rate performance.
The solutions also simplify and improve the efficiency of deploying security services by consolidating the “security sprawl” of traditional designs into much fewer high- capacity and high-performance chassis-based products. Based on a dynamic services architecture, these products allow breakthrough improvements in the speed of deploying new security services—made possible by “true services integration” within a single operating system.
Consolidation of security services not only makes the security infrastructure more energy and space efficient, but also makes operations much simpler by reducing the total number of devices that need to be managed. Performing all the security services without passing through multiple limited-scale and single-function appliances drastically lowers application latency across the network. Advanced routing technologies and platforms deliver agility of business operations by improving the scalability of converged core networks that span multiple data centers. Data centers can now rapidly deploy new applications and support new services with less complexity to achieve business growth objectives with improved performance and lower total cost.
Challenges
The traditional data center has become overly complex, costly, and extremely inefficient. Arguably, it is the single biggest hurdle that prevents businesses from fully reaping the productivity benefits offered by other innovations occurring in the data center, including: server virtualization, storage over Ethernet, and evolution in application delivery models.
Traditional architectures that have stayed unchanged for over 10 years employ excessive switching tiers, largely to work around low performance and low-density characteristics of the devices used in those designs. Growth in the number of users and applications is almost always accompanied by an increase in the number of “silos” of more devices— both for connectivity as well as for security. Adding further insult to injury, these upgrades introduce new untested operating systems to the environment. The ensuing additional capital expenses, rack space, power consumption, and management overhead directly contribute to the overall complexity of maintaining data center operations.
Unfortunately, instead of containing the costs of running the data center and reallocating the savings into the acceleration of productivity-enhancing business practices, the IT budget continues to be misappropriated into sustaining existing data center operations.
Trends
Data center consolidation and virtualization trends are accelerating in an effort to optimize resources and lower cost. Consolidation, virtualization and storage are placing greater network performance and security demands on the network infrastructure. While server virtualization greatly improves server resource utilization, it also greatly increases the amount of data traffic on the network infrastructure. Applications running in a virtual server environment require low latency, high throughput, robust QoS and HA. Increased traffic per port and performance demands tax the traditional network infrastructure beyond its capabilities. Furthermore, high-bandwidth and low-latency data storage requirements—and the increased adoption of iSCSI and NAS—add to the demands on the network infrastructure. With the future standardization of Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), this technology promises to place even greater bandwidth and performance demands on the network infrastructure.
Additionally, new application architectures, such as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web Oriented Architecture (WOA), and new services—such as cloud computing, desktop virtualization, and Software as a Service (SaaS)—create increased performance and bandwidth demands upon the data center network infrastructure. These heightened demands often require new platforms in the data center, contributing to increased complexity and cost. IT data centers are rapidly migrating to the high-performance network infrastructure recommended by Imtech to improve data center-based productivity, while lowering time to market for new data center applications and reducing operational cost.
Imtech Solution
Portfolio for the Data Center
Imtech Data Center Infrastructure Solutions provide operational simplicity, agility, and efficiency to dramatically simplify the network with the following key technologies:
Virtual Chassis technology, combined with wire-rate 10 Gigabit Ethernet performance in the Juniper’s EX Series Ethernet Switches, reduces the number of networking devices and interconnections. This effectively eliminates the need for an aggregation tier—contributing to a significant reduction of capital equipment cost and network operational costs, improved application performance, and faster time to deploy new servers and applications.
Dynamic Services Architecture in the Juniper’s SRX Series Services Gateways consolidates security appliances with distinct functions into a highly integrated, multifunction platform that results in simpler network designs, improved application performance—and a reduction of space, power, and cooling requirements.
Network virtualization with MPLS in the Juniper’s MX Series Ethernet Services Routers and the Imtech M Series Multiservice Edge Routers enables network segmentation across data centers and to remote offices for applications and departments without the need to build separate or overlay networks.
JUNOS Software operates across the network infrastructure, providing feature parity and reducing certification time for new releases.
Juniper’s Network and Security Manager (NSM) provides a single portal with end-to-end visibility across the data center for security, switching, and routing infrastructure.
J-Care Technical Services provide automated incident management and proactive analysis assistance through the Advanced Insight Solutions technology resident in JUNOS.
Juniper high-performance data center network architecture reduces cost and complexity by requiring fewer tiers of switching-and consolidating security services, a common operating system, and one extensible model for network management reducing Devices, interconnections, and Tiers in the Data center network
In many data center environments, three or more tiers of Ethernet switches are required to aggregate servers to the network core. To reduce the number of switching tiers, Juniper Data Center Infrastructure Solutions employ Virtual Chassis technology, which enables up to 10 EX4200 switches to be interconnected as a single, logical device. Although collectively the member switches behave as a single platform, each individual physical switch has its own power supply and fan tray, providing high Ethernet-switching availability within the Virtual Chassis configuration.
Using Virtual Chassis technology for top-of-rack or end-of-row deployments to aggregate servers in the data center dramatically reduces switch aggregation links and ports. Rather than requiring redundant links for each physical switch to ensure HA, redundant links are only needed for each Virtual Chassis group. Depending on the configuration, some switches in the Virtual Chassis group may not have uplinks but instead leverage uplinks on the other member switches. A high-capacity backplane connects all of the physical switches in the Virtual Chassis configuration, allowing for failover to interconnected backup switches. This configuration significantly reduces the number of links required to ensure network connection redundancy, while reducing or eliminating the need for Spanning Tree Protocol in the access-switching tier of the data center.
This architecture eliminates an aggregation tier and leverages the EX4200 switches as top-of-rack or end-of-row switches in a Virtual Chassis configuration, connecting directly to a pair of Imtech EX8208 core data center switches. Delivering non-blocking, high-density performance, the EX 8208 delivers 192 wire-rate 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports in a single rack and can effectively collapse the aggregation and core into a single tier. When the integration of switching and advanced routing services are needed, the EX4200 switches connect directly to a pair of Juniper Networks MX960 Ethernet Services Routers in the data center core network. The MX960 delivers scalability and flexibility with up to 1 million MAC addresses, 8,000 to 16,000 VLANs, and up to 64,000 circuit IDs. Layer 3 and feature-rich MPLS services allow data center administrators to achieve improved traffic engineering, recovery times, QoS, network virtualization, and convergence—thus improving performance with the added value of lowering total cost of ownership.
Enhancing network Utilization Through Virtualization
The Imtech data center network architecture employs a mix of virtualization technologies—such as Virtual Chassis technology with VLANs and MPLS-based advanced traffic engineering, VPN enhanced security, QoS, VPLS, and other virtualization services. These virtualization technologies address many of the challenges introduced by server, storage and application virtualization. For example, Virtual Chassis supports low-latency server live migration from server to server in completely different racks within a data center and from server to server between data centers in a flat Layer 2 network when these data centers are within reasonably close proximity. Virtual Chassis with MPLS allows the Layer 2 domain to extend across data centers to support live migration from server to server when data centers are distributed over significant distances.
Juniper’s virtualization technologies support the low latency, throughput, QoS and HA required of server and storage virtualization. MPLS-based virtualization addresses these requirements with advanced traffic engineering to provide bandwidth guarantees, label switching and intelligent path selection for optimized low latency and fast reroute for extremely HA across the WAN. MPLS-based VPNs enhance security with QoS to efficiently meet application and user performance needs
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These virtualization technologies serve to improve efficiencies and performance with greater agility while simplifying operations. For example, acquisitions and new networks can be quickly folded into the existing MPLS-based infrastructure without reconfiguring the network to avoid IP address conflicts. This approach creates a highly flexible and efficient data center WAN. Imtech virtualization technologies are unmatched in their support to improve network utilization and improve productivity with lower total cost. a common oS and management Platform JUNOS Software is the field-proven operating system powering Juniper routing, switching and security infrastructure in the data center. It enables the consolidation of security and networking onto a common operating system with feature consistency and interoperability across the entire data center network.
Manageability and flexibility of the data center are enhanced to address business needs as they arise and improve data center operations. A common set of tools are used to monitor, administer, and troubleshoot the network—allowing data center operations teams to function more efficiently with less training, while providing higher availability. Unlike any other networking infrastructure OS on the market, JUNOS provides one operating system, enhanced through a single release train and developed upon a common modular architecture—giving enterprises a “1-1-1 advantage.”