HPE7-A12Demo

Waratah Hospital, located in Australia, plans to relocate many data-center services to a new facility. (The remaining legacy data center is not included in this project.) Waratah Hospital has engaged an external consultant to help design the new data-center network.

Based on the data-center network-infrastructure requirements, the external consultant has produced a high-level design. The design document is summarized below.

Requirements and information:

• Six racks in the data-center room (a single row).
• Redundant top-of-rack leaf switches with back-to-front cooling in every rack, delivering 10/25-Gbps connectivity to servers, storage, and other devices.
• Four 100-GbE uplinks per leaf switch.
• The customer requested that all switch ports face the rear of the rack racks (hot aisle).
• OOB management for servers, storage, and network devices must be provided through an external switch with back-to-front cooling. This switch must be included in the solution. One OOB switch provides connectivity for two racks.
• Core equipment for the OOBM network is being reused.
• Middle-of-row spine switches.
• The data center must connect to the hospital building through links providing 400 Gbps.
• Internet access is supplied through an existing firewall cluster containing two firewalls, with one firewall in each data room. The second firewall operates in standby mode, and VRRP is used for firewall failover. The data-center network must connect to these firewalls through links totaling 100 Gbps.
• The external link is a dark-fiber direct link using single-mode fiber (OS2). The distance to the main hospital is 1.5 KM. The links will terminate on two core switches in the hospital.

The customer additionally requires:

• 99.999% uptime for this life-critical environment.
• Planned and unplanned downtime must be minimized.
• Software upgrades are permitted only once per year, with close to zero downtime.
• All life-critical resources are accessed locally, and all resources reside within the hospital campus.
• Waratah Hospital requires a highly secure data-center environment. Encrypted wire-speed connectivity between the data room and hospital is mandatory because the inter-building link crosses a public road.
• Waratah Hospital has a mixture of virtualized (vSphere) servers, Nutanix storage, bare-metal servers, backup servers, and other devices.

Previously, the hospital experienced a security breach that caused data loss, network downtime, and identity theft.

Refer to the scenario. You have learned that the customer must extend two VRFs between the new data-center facility and the hospital. To meet the scenario requirements and general best practices, what should you recommend to connect border leaf switches to the hospital core?