This is the second post of my four part series discussing private cloud architecture. In this post I will discuss selecting the various providers necessary
This is part 1 of a 4 part series discussing the architecture of private clouds and when they may be an appropriate choice over public clouds. A private cloud is a virtualized environment running on your own hardware, not a public cloud like AWS, Azure, or GCP. The architecture described in this series would be a good fit for a vast majority of the businesses which provide some sort of services to an end user that needs high availability and good performance.
We decided to replace our Juniper EX series (in a Virtual Chassis configuration) that had caused us some issues over the last couple of years in 4 separate datacenters. Ok, issues is an understatement, we had entire switch clusters crash based on how long they were running, we completely lost confidence in them.
In researching our needs and our desire to use this as an opportunity to upgrade our backbone (and not just admit we made a bad decision with Juniper), we decided on Mellanox’s Spectrum SN2010 series switches with a mix of 25G and 100G ports in a half-width chassis; Yes, 2 switches per 1U of rack space, each with redundant PSUs. Mellanox has a great reputation in the HPC realm, and are focused on just switches and NICs. To prove out our solution, our vendor, Vology, was able to get us a couple of demo units before shelling out the money for our 8 new switches.