HPE7-A12Demo

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

Based on the data center network-infrastructure requirements, the external consultant has produced a high-level design. The following summarizes the design document’s contents.

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 back of the racks (hot aisle).
• OOB management for servers, storage, and network must be delivered 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 with links providing 400 Gbps.
• Internet access is provided through an existing firewall cluster with two firewalls, with each firewall in one data room. The second firewall operates in standby mode, and VRRP is used on the firewalls for failover. The data center network must connect to these firewalls with links totaling 100 Gbps.
• The external link is a dark-fiber direct link based on 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 also 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 are within the hospital campus.
• Waratah Hospital requires a highly secure data-center environment. Encrypted wire-speed connectivity between the data room and the hospital is mandatory because the link between the buildings crosses a public road.
• Waratah Hospital has a mix of virtualized (vSphere) servers, Nutanix storage, bare-metal servers, backup servers, and other devices.

In the past, 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 network and the firewall. To meet the scenario requirements and general best practices, what should you recommend for connecting border leaf switches to the hospital core?