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Data Center Architecture

Data center network design, consolidation and live migration — including moving one data center into another with the estate running throughout.

Left to right is time. Each row is one of the 12 disciplines this one worked alongside, ordered so kindred disciplines sit next to each other rather than alphabetically — a landscape only means anything if neighboring rows belong together. Height is the work running in that domain in that year, weighted by what failure would have cost — life-safety ×3, a statutory obligation ×2.2, the estate itself ×1.5, an evaluation ×1. Every project declares which of those it was, so each ridge traces to an entry you can open and disagree with. Only the work that used this technology is counted, so what shows here is the company it kept rather than the record around it. Height and color are on the record-wide scale rather than this page’s own, so a modest estate draws a modest landscape and any two of these pages can be read against each other.

Design and consolidation of data center estates, and the harder discipline of changing one while it is carrying production.

The Annex-to-main consolidation is the reference case: a temporary core built specifically to carry the firewall service modules and DMZ connections so the production cores could move in phases rather than in one window, both firewall modules held active/standby through the transition, and a migration onto a new firewall platform folded into the same effort. Layer 3 lifted off the server stacks onto a redundant switch pair with HSRP, point-to-point links reworked as trunks through an intermediary aggregate switch, and OSPF areas redesigned with authenticated adjacencies.

Subtopics

  • Data Center Facility DesignThe power and cooling underneath the architecture — floor plans, rack elevations, containment, dual UPS and independent A/B electrical paths.

Applied in

  • Client Architecture Portfolio2024–202688 numbered engagements across two years, twenty-plus live at any moment, across healthcare, manufacturing, financial services and the public sector — the inverse of nineteen years inside one estate, and a different problem.
  • Healthcare Estates2024–2026Five providers — firewall and intrusion-prevention upgrades against an active vendor advisory, a multi-site data center fabric on standing retainer, and segmentation with virtual desktop.
  • Diversified Industrial Manufacturer2025–2026Business-unit and data center assessments, automated discovery and network assurance, an enterprise architecture review, and integration across two acquisitions.
  • Enterprise Networking Practice Lab2026Three repurposed servers being rebuilt into a 2.3 TB virtualized network emulation cluster, funded on a cost-per-month argument against a six-month procurement lead time — and the end of a practice running on engineers' own hardware.
  • State and Local Government Delivery2025–2026A state transportation department data center relocation inside a single summer window, and county switching, firewall and platform replacement alongside it.
  • Enterprise Core Network2005–2024The city's core network across nineteen years — architecture, standards and, when it mattered, hands on the equipment.
  • Main Data Center Physical Connection Layout2009–2024The as-built record of every port, patch and strand in the main data center — a naming convention where the identifier is the location, carried to revision 21 over fifteen years.
  • Data Center Estate and Colocation Program2015–2024Six tiered sites for the city and five external agencies — and a municipal IT department selling colocation against commercial carriers, and winning on engineering.
  • Fourteen Weeks on the ToolsApril – August 2024The densest hands-on stretch of the NRI tenure — seven client engagements worked personally, in the configuration and the peer reviews and the customer calls, while taking over a team from the second day.
  • Annex to Main Data Center Consolidation2010–2018Moving one data center into another with the estate live throughout, on three design documents at revisions ten, twelve and ten.

Through subtopics

4 further projects reference a subtopic of this entry rather than the entry itself.

Career

Attested by

  • CCIE #100422002 · Lifetime EmeritusCisco Certified Internetwork Expert, earned August 4, 2002, maintained for twenty years and carried to Lifetime Emeritus in August 2022.

See also