Data Center Interconnect

[kmelchior]

I don't know how easy or hard this question is to answer without getting deep into details. But here is what I am trying to accomplish. I have (or will have) a data center and two collocations tied together with 10GB DWDM. The DC will have a 10GB circuit to each collo and the two collo's will be connected via 10GB as well. I do not want to create a 'routed triangle' by having the circuits each a L3 p2p. I would like for the data center to have to L3 paths to each collo, one direct and the other through the other collo. So I need to have that collo 'x-connect' between two physical circuits. My question is what is the best way to do that? Originally I was think I would just use an SVI on the L3 end point with a L2 vlan at the intermediate switch to do the 'x-connect', but I am thinking this may not be the best approach. Would EoMPLS or VPLS or something like that be a better solution? I really don't know too much about either.

[chrihussey]

Not exactly sure what you are trying to accomplish but I would assume one would want traffic going to the Collos to take the shortest and most direct path. The routed triangle sounds the most efficient to me.

Anyhow, yes, if you made the links trunk links with VLANs passing through each Colo to the other across the inter Collo link, yes you could achieve the desired result.

I would also prefer DWDM over a MPLS or VPLS solution as it eliminates the need to traverse a provider's network.

Hope this helps

[kmelchior]

What I am basically trying to accomplish is my DC having redundant paths to each collocation and all my WAN services upstream from the collos (domestic WAN, international WAN, Internet, etc) but I also want to load share the traffic on those redundant links. Each collo also has redundant WAN services. When I started looking at the routed triangle solution I could see the potential for a lot fo routing loops and things like that without many benefits over the two collos not talking to each other. So I am trying to get each collo to have two paths back to the DC, one path is direct over DWDM and the other path is DWDM to the other collo one one circuit and 'x-connected' to another DWDM circuit from that collo to my DC. It's that 'transparent' xconnect that I am trying to figure out the best way to approach.

[chrihussey]

So if I understand you correctly, the two collos really don't need a direct connection to each other and you want each collo to have redundant equal cost links to the DC. One being a direct DWDM connection and the other being a DWDM connection through the other collo. I'm sure that is possible, I guess the question is how, who or what is doing the DWDM piece?