Help us improve your experience.

Let us know what you think.

Do you have time for a two-minute survey?

 

Requirements of a Two-Tiered Virtualized Data Center for Large Enterprise Networks

 

Large enterprises have certain specific needs for the hosting environment that the design of their data center must meet. This section describes the requirements of a company that operates as a service provider to its individual business units (BUs).

One of the primary requirements of a virtualized data center (VDC) for a large enterprise is the ability to segment the network by business unit. This includes traffic segmentation and administrative control segmentation.

Other requirements include security controls between business units, security controls between the company and the outside world, flexibility to grow and adapt the network, and a robust and cost-effective way to manage the entire network.

Network Traffic Segmentation

The requirement described here is for network resources to be isolated in several ways. Traffic must be segmented by business units. Traffic flows between network segments must be prohibited except where specifically allowed. Traffic isolation must be controlled at designated policy enforcement points. Network resources must be dedicated to a segment, but the network must have the flexibility to change the allocation of resources.

Segmented resources must be logically grouped according to policies. For example, test traffic must be isolated from production traffic. Traffic must also be isolated according to business entities, contractual requirements, legal or regulatory requirements, risk rating, and corporate standards.

The network segmentation design must not be disruptive to the business, must be integrated with the larger data center and cloud network design, must allow business units to access network resources globally, and must support new business capabilities.

Flexibility

The network design must be flexible enough to react to business and environment changes with minimal design and re-engineering efforts. The VDC design must be flexible in terms of isolating business unit workloads from other business units and general data center services and applications. The network solution must ensure that the business is minimally impacted when network and segmentation changes take place.

The VDC must be flexible enough to be implemented:

  • Within a single data center

  • Within a data hall

  • Across two or more data centers

  • Across two or more data halls within or between data centers

  • Between a data center and an external cloud service provider

Security

The network design must allow business units to be isolated within the hosting environment. In the event of a network security incident, business units must be isolated from the hosting environment and other business units.

Traffic flow between business unit segments must be denied by default and must be explicitly permitted only at policy enforcement points owned and controlled by the data center service provider.

The policy enforcement point must include access control capabilities and might include threat protection capabilities.

Access and Availability

The VDC must provide access to common data center services such as computation, storage, security, traffic management, operations, and applications. The network must operate across multiple global service providers and must deliver optimal, predictable, and consistent performance across the network. The VDC must be implemented across data center business units.

The network solution must meet business unit availability requirements as defined in service-level agreements.

Cost-Effective Incremental Scaling

The VDC design must be cost effective for the business to run and must enable new business capabilities. It must be possible to implement the network solution in an incremental manner with minimal impact to the business.

Orchestration and Automation

The VDC design must include a management system that supports automation for provisioning, availability and workload monitoring, and reporting. Workload and availability reports must be available by business unit.