Modern automated data centers are a cornerstone of IT infrastructure, with s direct impact on business operations: workloads need to be provisioned on-demand, shrunk or expanded momentarily, all while maintaining compliant, standardized configurations and policies. Networking has a crucial impact on this mission, as it shouldn’t impede scalability, while at the same time it should enable service flexibility (supporting both NFV and legacy services) and granular (micro)segmentation for security and stability.
Several vendors address this challenge, each with their design philosophy and operational model. Among them, Cisco ACI, VMware NSX, and EVPN are by far the most commonly deployed models and technologies. Deciding on one of them will have a significant impact on the rest of your data center design as well as on the investment size and eventual operational flexibility.