Skip to Main Content
BGP in the Data Center
book

BGP in the Data Center

by Dinesh G. Dutt
August 2017
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
89 pages
2h 1m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from BGP in the Data Center

Chapter 1. Introduction to Data Center Networks

A network exists to serve the connectivity requirements of applications, and applications serve the business needs of their organization. As a network designer or operator, therefore, it is imperative to first understand the needs of the modern data center, and the network topology that has been adapted for the data centers. This is where our journey begins. My goal is for you to understand, by the end of the chapter, the network design of a modern data center network, given the applications’ needs and the scale of the operation.

Data centers are much bigger than they were a decade ago, with application requirements vastly different from the traditional client–server applications, and with deployment speeds that are in seconds instead of days. This changes how networks are designed and deployed.

The most common routing protocol used inside the data center is Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). BGP has been known for decades for helping internet-connected systems around the world find one another. However, it is useful within a single data center, as well. BGP is standards-based and supported by many free and open source software packages.

It is natural to begin the journey of deploying BGP in the data center with the design of modern data center networks. This chapter is an answer to questions such as the following:

  • What are the goals behind a modern data center network design?

  • How are these goals different from other networks such as ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Building Data Centers with VXLAN BGP EVPN: A Cisco NX-OS Perspective

Building Data Centers with VXLAN BGP EVPN: A Cisco NX-OS Perspective

Lukas Krattiger, Shyam Kapadia, David Jansen

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781491983416