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Making assumptions relating to power, space, and infrastructure services, such as firewall, network, ACL, DNS, NTP, and so on, is a common pitfall and poses challenges for ECS installation. Thus, knowledge of requirements and existing infrastructure at the customer site is important to mitigate this issue. Documentation and tools are available to help plan, prepare, and design ECS to fit your requirements and eliminate the guesswork.
To review, the following components illustrated in Figure 2 form the basis of an ECS deployment:
A VDC is built up of one or more racks, where each rack requires a tile space on the data center floor. Racks communicate across the site's local area network (LAN) by means of uplink network connections through a pair of 25 GbE switches for EX500, EX5000, and EXF900. These switches may be purchased with the ECS as part of the solution or may also be customer-provided switches. In addition, ECS communicates privately over a closed backend for administrative tasks; no data travels over the backend network except EXF900, which uses a dedicated RDMA backend network. Storage and performance requirements primarily determine the quantity of racks deployed at each site. Floor space and plans for future growth are also considerations.
A multisite deployment is built by federating two or more sites. ECS enables you to configure replication either within a single site or across multiple sites. It provides flexibility in solution design, allowing for data separation, protection against many types of failures, and global access.
After understanding the terminology and components, review the documentation and tools that can help in the planning and deployment. They include:
All hardware, software, and licensing are associated with a specific and unique site ID. Use the ECS Designer to perform the critical work of keeping site information up to date. Verify the site information for accuracy from the earliest planning stages, through the ordering process, and all the way through provisioning, alerting, and remote access. Support issues are tied to site IDs as well. Contact your account team if you do not receive the installation scripts from the ECS Designer team.
Planning documentation and tools best practices |
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