Technical data

DATA CENTER and CAMPUS NETWORKS DEPLOYMENT GUIDE
Deploying Brocade Networks with Microsoft Lync Server 2010 11 of 52
the Microsoft Lync Server 2010 environment if bandwidth is saturated. Fixed rate limiting allows you to specify the
maximum number of bytes a given port can send or receive, and it applies to all traffic on the rate-limited port.
REFERENCE ARCHITECTURE
Unified Communications, particularly High Definition (HD) video, is a significant driver of network traffic. Traditionally,
basic communications all had their own independent technologies, such as PBXs, telephones, and cell phones. In
many cases, these communication devices were not attached to the network. UC has now bridged that gap by
keeping people connected at all times. However, all that traffic is now sent over the network. Being able to prioritize
network traffic is very important to ensure that the most important data gets the higher priority.
Network designs vary depending on the size of your environment. Brocade has created and validated network
architectures for campus and data center environments to help simplify and speed up Microsoft Unified
Communications deployments.
Data Center
The Brocade Unified Communications reference architecture for data center environments, shown in Figure 3, is
based on a flattened two-tier network design and is comprised of the following:
• Core layer
• Ethernet fabric access layer
• Hardware load balancing
Figure 3. Lync reference architecture for data center environments.