Data Center Design Case Studies
The new digital book by Ivan Pepelnjak describes typical data center designs, from WAN edge routing to cloud networking infrastructure, server connectivity, and virtual appliances. Design scenarios described in the book are based on dozens of consulting engagements solving real-life customer challenges. The book is available in DRM-free watermarked PDF format.
- Pavel Skovajsa, Network Architect, AT&T (and former developer of Dynagen/GNS3)
- The Data Center Design Case Studies is one of the best stuff I read for past years. The format itself is concise, up to the point, and most importantly addresses many issues that I run into in practice so I can immediately connect with the problem described.
Content Overview
The WAN edge scenarios described in the book include:
- Optimizing BGP routing on data center WAN edge routers to reduce the downtime and brownouts following link or node failures;
- Integrating MPLS/VPN network provided by one or more service providers with DMVPN-over-Internet backup network;
- Building large-scale DMVPN network connecting one or more data centers with thousands of remote sites;
- Implementing redundant data center connectivity and routing between active/active data centers and the outside world;
- External routing combined with layer-2 data center interconnect.
The data center infrastructure part of the book covers these topics:
- Designing a private cloud network infrastructure;
- Redundant server-to-network connectivity;
- Replacing the central firewall with a scale-out architecture combining packet filters, virtual inter-subnet firewalls and VM NIC firewalls (chapter 8);
- Combining physical and virtual appliances in a private cloud (chapter 9);
- High-speed multi-tenant isolation (chapter 10);
The final part of the book covers scale-out architectures, multiple data centers, and disaster recovery:
- Scale-out private cloud infrastructure using standardized building blocks (chapter 11);
- Simplified workload migration and disaster recovery with virtual appliances (chapter 12);
- Disaster Recovery and Active-Active data centers with scale-out application architectures (chapter 13);
Happy Campers
About the book
- it is a good end to end
- E Gary Hauser
- Consistent, clear and to-the-point.
Well written and technical enough to satisfy most people. - Håvard Staub Nyhus
- Nothing special
- IRFAN JAMIL
- Great resource for case studies and reference designs, I use it often for sanity checks on my networks.
- Andrzej Wytyczak
- This is a great book. It focuses on the main challenges regarding the topics discussed. It is a valuable asset and you might consider the material as a must for network designers and architects.
- Bogdan Plevit
- I found this book to be an extremely useful insight into designing data centres and DC based services, I especially liked the MPLS / DMVPN design discussion.
My only criticism would be that I would have like to see the full configs used at the end of each section but that probably says more about my engineering skills than it does about Ivan's excellent design resource. - David Golding
- You can find very interesting information about build datacenter. After reading this book, you will have bigger scope/viev abut datacenter - especially if you need have some more complicated routing etc.
- dariusz chomiuk
- The book is very straightforward on Data Center Design with cases studies from someone that really understand how the technologies work and how they can be best applied on the field!
- Augusto Carlson
- As a network engineer in small system integrator company I felt that I need to expand my knowledge but I didn't know what are the most up-to-date and actual topics. This was hard reading for me, but now I know my "white spots" and the direction of the googling.
- Alexey Semenchuk
- Good architecture principles, but ex cisco config must be added in the annex
- Silvere Megelas
- useful
- Ronny Chan
- This book is very good. The use cases are realistic, well written, well explained, and to the point.
- Nicholas Russo
- Read and deploy. Easy.
- NIKOLAY KOVANYEV
Blog comments
- This type of book is from my point of view - exactly what's missing in the networking publishing world. It has real case studies, real issues, well argued and documented solutions presented in a friendly and clean format. Ivan's style makes it easy to read and valuable nuggets from his wealth of experience and knowledge are elegantly and efficiently passed on. I've read this in one breath as a novel - not really the way it should be done but I was really curious to see all that I'll be able to dig in deeper afterwards. The DMVPN case study gave me a few extra points to consider for a current project. Looking forward to the next chapters! Thank you, Ivan!
- Barbara B.