As demands grow for cloud computing, for access from anywhere on any device, for 24x7x365 uptime, for self-service, for Big Data analytics and other business-related services, it becomes clear that the network is key to the new data center and without the network, there is no cloud. Responses to business demands have led to increased network management complexity – including more nodes on the compute cycle, unpredictable traffic patterns, decoupling of logical and physical systems, and the multi-dimensional relationships between those systems and the applications and services they support.

The job of designing and managing the network has grown beyond basic LANs and WANs. Business processes must be mapped to a complex and dynamic infrastructure. Security and accountability are major concerns, especially when multiple application providers in public and hybrid clouds provide specialized services and communications expand beyond a single data center. Data center operators must make sure that third-party application services are reliable, accountable, auditable and compliant with enterprise policies and applicable regulatory controls.

It becomes critical to design data center networks that reduce complexity, increase agility and manageability while providing the flexibility to evolve with changing business demands and the technical responses to those demands.

The Business Links approach to enterprise network design combines design principles, robust requirements gathering, experience with industry-leading providers such as Cisco, F5, Brocade and Juniper and with innovations such as OpenFlow and SDN, and applying physical and software-based solutions to your network requirements. This approach is used whether you are designing a network for a new data center, establishing new communications between data centers, enabling a cloud environment or simply upgrading an existing data center.

Business Links network design incorporates the following design principles:

• Standardizing on modular scalable components in an efficient physical layout to simplify operational tasks and controls.
• Assuring delivery of requirements for capacity, performance, throughput and availability.
• Providing a resilient HA architecture so that there is no single point of failure.
• Securing all services on the network, whether physical, virtual, in the cloud, wired or wireless.
• Enabling monitoring and automation to streamline provisioning, change orchestration, troubleshooting and responsiveness.

Every project includes use case definition to support the design and build processes and to assure that the as-built physical, logical and software-defined network components are tested to meet requirements.