Putting It All Together

If you haven't watched this webinar when studying the previous modules, please do it now - it contains a step-by-step explanation of a typical data center infrastructure design process.

Access content

Can you combine VMware NSX with Cisco Nexus 9000 switches? Should you run EVPN or ACI on the physical switches? What design guidelines should you follow? What are the potential gotchas? In his presentation Mitja Robas answered all these questions, and described a few of the lessons learned while building a production NSX+EVPN environment.

The Spring 2017 course concluded with an interactive panel discussion with Andrew Lerner and Simon Richard from Gartner. We discussed these topics:

• Current State of the Enterprise Networking
• What happened to SDN (and brite-boxes)
• Premium people versus premium products
• Network Incrementalism and other worst practices
• Rethinking Network Downtime
• The WAN is Cool again (SD-WAN, vCPE)
• Emerging Topics: Container Networking and Intent-based Networking

Data Center infrastructure design is rarely a purely technical challenge. In many cases you have to work with your end-customers (application developers), help them understand the technology limitations, and adapt your ideas to their needs. Your challenges will be even more interesting when you encounter a culture clash, for example between traditional operations and DevOps-focused developers.

In her presentation, Michele Chubirka briefly explained the concepts behind familiar buzzwords like Waterfall, Agile and DevOps, and then described how you could run secure and reliable infrastructure in DevOps environment.

We concluded the Spring 2016 course with a review of submitted design assignments.

These ExpertExpress case studies cover interesting design or migration challenges you might encounter when upgrading your data center infrastructure.