DataCenter Transformation - Solving challenges and delivering business outcomes

Business and application requirements have been driving Datacenter transformation, the (not so) new business models and application trends uncovered and revealed some of the classical architectures limitations demanding a deep change in the way the end-to-end Datacenter stack is designed and operated.

An evolutionary approach is required to solve these challenges, providing the necessary scale, agility, optimization and automation in order to deliver the expected business outcomes.

Datacenter evolution to Fabric based architectures and VXLAN overlays provide a simplified Network with high flexibility, efficiency and scale, leveraging an optimized and deterministic forwarding, a distributed control plane and integrated physical & virtual workloads.

Since the introduction of BGP EVPN in the control plan, VXLAN is becoming the most widely used standard overlay protocol for the next gen datacenter, among many other advantages, EVPN introduced the well known native BGP scalability, policy manipulation, resiliency and authentication also overcoming the inefficiencies introduced by the multicast flood and learn behaviour, using control plane learning for layer 2 and layer 3 host reachability information.

 This optimized and enhanced control plane also introduced a new level of workload mobility leveraging the Distributed Anycast Gateway, in this architecture the Default Gateway function is fully distributed across all leaf nodes within the VXLAN fabric (or multiple fabrics) eliminating the need for the classical FHRP solutions and localization filtering workarounds in high availability solutions.

Leveraging IRB-Integrated Routing and Bridging for optimized L2/L3 forwarding at the leaf switches, Anycast Gateway provides optimal east-west and north-south traffic enhancing truly seamless virtual machine mobility.

 VXLAN EVPN Fabrics also provides a huge flexibility in multipod or multisite designs supporting both classical DCI options or stretched fabric solutions to extend VXLAN between fabrics providing an end-to-end overlay, managed and operated as single logical fabric, this approach greatly facilitates the introduction of a central controller providing consolidation, automation and abstraction for the geo distributed fabric.

 This flexible, high performance, native multi-tenant fabric architecture has become one of the most common standard solutions for SDN deployments, laying the functional and technical foundation to meet the growing and fast changing business requirements positioning the Datacenter as a true business enabler.

Another critical factor for VXLAN EVPN mainstream adoption is the standard based, well known protocols that facilitate a confident and safe transition for this Datacenter transformation, while enabling a fully abstracted, automated, open, programmable fabric.

Cisco is leading the transformation implementing VXLAN EVPN and IRB on several Nexus platforms and providing valuable orchestration/automation tools like ACI, NFM and VTS.