Now that we have the site survey information and the available power, cooling, and space, we can start designing and calculating what our needs are for the network. After the PoC, we will refer to the RFI, where we have physical specifications for each device. The data may also be available online, which is generally how we get data for open networking and white-box systems.

We will take the data from the PoC and RFI to determine the amount of equipment we will be using and the characteristics of the equipment. Remember, if you are using Direct Attach Cables (DACs) or fiber transceivers, we need to account for them.

Design the network for expansion; you may need to add more cards to certain devices later, but those devices should have available slots for expansion. For example, if your design is two racks in a pod with two router/switches, two aggregation (ToR) switches, and a significant amount of compute/storage hardware, you will want to design...