Architecting a software-defined data center with Big Cloud Fabric and Dell EMC ScaleIO/VxFlex OS

Published August 2017

Applications are the engines for modern businesses. They drive innovation, operational efficiency, and revenue generation. They demand an infrastructure that is highly agile and easy to manage while reducing costs. These applications, which include mission critical Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, multitier web applications, and big data, have placed new constraints on the networking infrastructure; support for high east-west traffic bandwidth, virtual machine mobility, and multitenancy.

Infrastructure teams have struggled to respond to these requirements. Unlike the rest of the portfolio they manage, legacy networks remain highly static and require extensive manual intervention and operational overhead. While the speed, scale, and density of equipment offered by traditional networking vendors have increased over the last two decades, the underlying architectures and business operating models have stayed fundamentally unchanged. Dell EMC is working closely with Big Switch Networks to introduce the industry’s first data center leaf-spine IP fabric solution built using Dell EMC open networking switches and Big Cloud Fabric (BCF). This joint solution applies the hardware-software disaggregation enabled by Dell EMC and Big Switch Networks. Software Defined Network (SDN) designs inspired by hyperscale data center architectures, provide significant cost savings and operational efficiencies for enterprise data centers by enabling the VMware centered softwaredefined data center (SDDC).

With built-in integration for VMware, BCF is an ideal physical network for virtual environments, network virtualization, and hyper-converged Infrastructure (HCI). It is the industry’s first SDN-based fabric, using open networking switch hardware that provides intelligent, agile, and flexible networking for the VMware SDDC.

With servers, networking, and virtualization in place, distributed storage remains as the final component of the SDDC model. Dell EMC ScaleIO is a perfect storage foundation for the SDDC. ScaleIO delivers scale-out, block storage using commodity hardware. ScaleIO creates a server-based Storage Area Network (SAN) built from server direct-attached storage to deliver flexible and scalable performance on demand.

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