Building Next-Generation Data Center

This section contains important material you should read first - it tells you how to progress through the course, how to select design challenges, submit your solutions, and ask for help.

The first module of the course focuses on the big picture and requirement collection phase. Topics discussed include:

• How to identify services that have to be offered by the data center infrastructure
• Identifying the reliability and recovery requirements
• Multi-DC considerations
• DC placement (on-premises or colocation)
• How to collect the infrastructure requirements

The automation and orchestration topics are usually discussed as an afterthought, but we’ll start with them because they are one of the most crucial aspects of a successful data center deployment.

We'll figure out what our single source of truth is, what data storage mechanism to use, and how to use the network and services state to provision infrastructure and services, and validate network operations. We'll also discuss various network automation tools, and select the best one for the job that needs to be done.

You can’t start designing or building a data center infrastructure from the bottom up. Before designing the network you need to understand the workloads the network has to support. In this section we’ll talk about:

• Server virtualization and impact of high-density virtualization
• Bare-metal servers, virtual machines and containers
• Networking requirements of hypervisor- and container products

In immortal words of Howard Marks, "Storage is different". In this section you'll figure out why storage administrators have to have a totally different view of the world, how traditional storage was implement, what software-defined storage and hyperconverged infrastructure are, and what protocols you might have to support to connect physical or virtual servers with the storage arrays or scale-out storage infrastructure.

The first networking infrastructure module of the course introduces the data center fabrics concept and the leaf-and-spine architecture.

After completing this module you'll be able to design a small leaf-and-spine fabric.

In this module you'll learn how to design stable and scalable leaf-and-spine fabrics, regardless of whether they have to provide layer-2 or layer-3 transport.

Overlay virtual networking is the new (scalable) approach to providing dynamic on-demand virtual networks.

In overlay virtual networking architectures the physical fabric provides stable IP transport while the fabric edge or the hypervisor virtual switches encapsulate customer Ethernet or IP traffic using encapsulation technologies like VXLAN.

After completing this module you'll be able to design an overlay virtual networking solution.

As Internet IPv6 adoption is reaching significant levels (25% global penetration, with large countries like US reaching 40% penetration), you cannot ignore the impact of IPv6 on your infrastructure any longer.

This section will help you understand the role of IPv6 in your data center and provide additional information in case you decided to deploy it.

In this section we'll discuss most common network services used in data center environments: load balancing and firewalling.

We'll also discuss whether to use physical or virtual appliances, and whether the in-kernel distributed firewalls are good enough to secure inter-server traffic.

When designing a data center infrastructure you'll inevitably encounter cloud computing - you might have to build the infrastructure to support a private or public cloud, support workload deployment in a public cloud, or connect your data center to a public cloud (aka hybrid cloud).

In this section you'll master the infrastructure aspects of cloud services, explore the security aspects of cloud computing, and get a blueprint for fast deployment in AWS environment.

This part of the course focuses on high-availability aspects of modern data center designs and deployments:

• How to define high availability
• Dispelling the high availability myths
• Identifying real business needs and their viability
• Deciding what’s feasible to do based on application architecture, and what makes sense to deploy;

In the last section of the course we’ll yet again refocus on the big picture: how to combine all the pieces we’ve discussed in the previous modules into an optimized data center infrastructure.

This section contains the comprehensive list of webinars included in the self-study materials.

Several presentations from the past live sessions are also part of the mandatory or recommended materials - see the individual modules for more details.