Server Room Network Refresh

INF is currently working on moving to a new high-speed server room network.

Unlike the previous networks which have a set of vlans that are only available for specific server rooms, the new high-speed network spans the same vlans across all INF server rooms.

Spanning vlans across servers rooms allows INF to migrate virtual machines across server rooms without having to change IP addresses (and therefore reboot the virtual machine).

The new high-speed server room network uses a pair of redundant Cisco Nexus routers placed in the EC2 1916 and MC 1061 IST server rooms. These server rooms have emergency generator power. By using vPC (Virtual Port Channel) and VRRP (Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol), this allows for the high-speed server room network to stay running in the event one of the routers goes down due to a power outage, hardware failure or software updates.

Each server room has a pair of Mellanox switches for server connections and distribution to other switches. The Mellanox *-a switch in each room has 2x 100GbE connections (one to each Cisco Nexus router) aggregated using LACP for redundancy.

The current draft of the high-speed network diagram is shown below.

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