Specifications

DESIGN GUIDE - Data Center LAN Connectivity Design Guide

Executive Summary

The data center LAN is a critical corporate asset, connecting servers, applications and storage services in the

enterprise. This strategic tool supports vital day-to-day operations and is crucial for corporate success. The data

center LAN faces a number of challenges as enterprises are centralizing applications and consolidating servers to

simplify operations and reduce costs while business productivity increasingly depends on operations carried out at

distributed branch offices. As businesses continue to expand across the globe, downtime is not an option—a data

center LAN must efficiently operate 24x7.

These trends raise the density, scalability, throughput and high availability (HA) requirements of the data center LAN.

Trying to support these needs with low-density, single-function legacy equipment is not only inefficient, it’s not cost

effective, adversely affecting performance, reliability, valuable rack and cabinet space as well as driving power and

cooling costs higher. Enterprises are also moving towards applications that use a Service-Oriented Architecture

(SOA) and also provide Software as a Service (SaaS), both of which present a new set of throughput, performance and

HA requirements for the data center LAN. New technologies such as virtualization are needed to increase scalability,

efficiency and lower total cost of ownership.

These changes, coupled with IT initiatives such as Unified Communications, require that data center LANs operate

with the same carrier-class reliability and performance demanded by fee-based service providers. Existing data

center infrastructure solutions cannot meet these requirements, nor do they provide the unified management

capabilities critical for reducing costs and streamlining operations.

Simply designing a data center that only deploys more servers, more storage, and more devices significantly

increases network complexity and cost. Legacy solutions are inefficient; for example, more than 50 percent of

Ethernet switch ports within the data center are typically used for switch interconnectivity. A new data center LAN

design that meets the growing performance demands of users and network-centric applications from a variety

of locations is needed. It also must economically scale and flexibly accommodate new computing trends and IT

initiatives without an entire redesign.

This document introduces the issues related to changing data center needs and also presents design considerations

and recommendations for data center LANs. In addition, it shows how infrastructure solutions from Juniper

Networks

advance the economics of networking, allowing businesses to “change the rules” with their IT

investments and create a truly innovative and competitive environment that helps them increase revenue and raise

productivity today and in the future.

Introduction

Data centers contain centralized computing resources vital to all employees in the enterprise, be they at

headquarters, a large regional office, a remote branch office, a home office or at a customer site. As most critical

business processes are carried out online, any data center LAN downtime or inefficiency has a negative impact on

business processes and the corporate bottom line. The data center LAN must provide secure, high-performance,

highly-available LAN services at scale to ensure that the network is always online and that the necessary resources

are always available to maximize business productivity and customer satisfaction.