Data Center LAN Migration Guide - Juniper Networks

Data Center LAN Migration Guide
Summary
Today’s data center is a vital component to business success in virtually all industries and markets. New trends and
technologies such as cloud computing and SOA-based applications have significantly altered data center traffic flows
and performance requirements. Data center designs based on the performance characteristics of older technology
and traffic flows have resulted in complex architectures which do not easily scale and also may not provide the
performance needed to efficiently meet today’s business objectives.
A simplified, next-generation, cloud-ready two-tier data center design is needed to meet these new challenges without
compromising performance or security. Since most enterprises won’t disrupt a production data center except for
scheduled maintenance and business continuity testing, a gradual migration to the “new network” is often most practical.
This guide has identified and described how migration towards a simpler two-tier design can begin at any time and
at various insertion points within an existing legacy data center architecture. These insertion points are determined
by related trigger events such as adding a new application or service, or by larger events such as data center
consolidation. This guide has outlined the design considerations for migration at each network layer, providing
organizations with a path towards a simplified high-performance network which can not only lower TCO, but also
provide the agility and efficiency to enable organizations to gain a competitive advantage by leveraging their data
center network.
Juniper Networks has been delivering a steady stream of network innovations for more than a decade. Juniper brings
this innovation to a simplified data center LAN solution built on three core principles: simplify, share, and secure.
Creating a simplified infrastructure with shared resources and secure services delivers significant advantages over
other designs. It helps lower costs, increase efficiency, and keep the data center agile enough to accommodate any
future business changes or technology infrastructure requirements.
Additional Resources
Data Center Design Resources
Juniper has developed a variety of materials that complement this Migration Guide and are helpful to the network
design process in multiple types of customer environments and data center infrastructures. On our public Internet
website, we keep many of these materials at the following locations:
1. Data Center Solution Reference Materials Site:
www.juniper.net/us/en/solutions/enterprise/data-center/simplify/#literature
At this location you will find information helpful to the design process at a number of levels, organized by selectable
tabs according to the type of information you are seeking—analyst reports, solution brochures, case studies, reference
architecture, design guides, implementation guides, and industry reports.
The difference between a reference architecture, design guide, and implementation guide is the level of detail the
document addresses. The reference architecture is the highest level organization of our data center network approach;
the design guide provides guidance at intermediate levels of detail appropriate to, say, insertion point considerations
(in the terms of this Migration Guide); and implementation guides provide specific guidance for important types
of network deployments at different tiers of the data center network. Implementation guides give customers and
other readers enough information to start specific product implementation tasks appropriate for the most common
deployment scenarios, and are quite usable in combination with an individual product’s installation, configuration, or
operations manual.
2. Information on Juniper’s individual lines relevant to the insertion scenarios described in this guide can be found at:
Ethernet switching: www.juniper.net/us/en/products-services/switching
IP routing: www.juniper.net/us/en/products-services/routing
Network security: www.juniper.net/us/en/products-services/security
Network management: www.juniper.net/us/en/products-services/software/junos-platform/junos-space
64 Copyright © 2012, Juniper Networks, Inc.