A data center networking design is primarily centered around providing access to the various computing resources in the data center and ensuring optimal traffic flows between them in the north-south and east-west directions. Another important aspect of the DC design is around security of the overall DC infrastructure and segregating coherent groups of servers into single domains and isolating them from the other resources that have a different security requirement.
The DC design is a hierarchical two or three tier design. The two-tier design is the most commonly used design in mid-sized organizations. Even larger organizations with a large number of servers with a lot of east-west traffic have started moving to two-tier spine leaf architectures.
A fundamental question to be answered in a DC design is the placement of the layer 3 boundary. Recall from Chapter 4,...