Cisco Technology, Inc.

Zeeshan Naseh

Vinay Gundi

Habib Madani

Mihaita Prunoiu

A reliable and secure data-center. The data center includes a first data-center tier that is adapted to connect to an external network and an internal portion of the data center. A first firewall instance interfaces the first tier and the external network. A second firewall instance interfaces the first tier and the internal portion of the data center. In a more specific embodiment, the first firewall instance and the second firewall instance accommodate Internet Protocol SECurity (IPSEC) terminations using one or more VPNSMs. In this embodiment, the first data-center tier implements a core tier that includes one or more core switches that facilitate implementing the first firewall instance and the second firewall instance. The interior portion of the network represents a DeMilitarized Zone (DMZ) that includes a second tier that is connected between the first data-center tier and a third tier. The second tier implements an aggregation tier that includes one or more aggregation switches that facilitate implementing reverse-proxy caching. Overall Layer-3 design methodology is used within each tier and across tiers for optimized packet switching. The aggregation tier includes one or more aggregation-tier service modules for implementing load balancing, Secure Socket Layer (SSL) offloading, and/or the reverse-proxy caching.

Secure high-throughput data-center network employing routed firewalls

Techniques are provided to derive a virtual machine workload cost for a data center. At a network management appliance that is in communication with network resources and computing resources used by a plurality of virtual machines executed by the computing resources for providing one or more services, usage metrics are collected from network components of the network resources operating with respect to traffic that passes through the network resources as a result of the plurality of virtual machines executed by the computing resources. The virtual machine workload cost is computed from the usage metrics.

Data center resource usage and cost determination

The present invention provides an active/standby data center that avoids the delay associated with a cached DNS entry to switch from the active data center to the standby data center. When the active data center becomes unavailable, the standby data center advertises the same address as the primary data center so the change over occurs quickly. When the IP address of the primary data center is no longer visible to the standby data center, the standby data center begins to advertise.

Disaster recovery for active-standby data center using route health and BGP

In one embodiment, a method can include: (i) classifying a packet in a server load balancer (SLB) for determining if the packet is destined for a virtual Internet protocol (VIP) address hosted on the SLB; (ii) selecting a server from a group of servers representing the VIP address; (iii) changing a destination IP address of the packet from the VIP address to a real IP address of the selected server; and (iv) recirculating the packet for repeating the classifying.

Virtual server recirculation

A distributed data center topology having at least a pair of active data centers that can recover from a disaster at one of the data centers and achieves load balancing using IGP (Interior Gateway Protocol) between data centers. The distributed data centers use virtual IP addresses, route health injection and Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) for business continuance, disaster recovery and load balancing. Active applications are deployed at each data center to provide a logical active/standby configuration for certain applications. Alternatively, active applications are deployed at both sites and BGP routes traffic to the closest data center edge router. Load balancing occurs over an internal IGP link between sites.

Application based active-active data center network using route health injection and IGP

A distributed data center topology having at least a pair of active data centers that can recover from a disaster at one of the data centers and achieves load balancing using IGP (Interior Gateway Protocol) between data centers. The distributed data centers use virtual IP addresses, route health injection and Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) for business continuance, disaster recovery and load balancing. The active/active topology supports load balancing where each site concurrently hosts active applications or applications can be hosted in a logical active/standby mode. IGP and RHI (Route Health Injection) are used to propagate routes to an edge router and BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) and IP Anycast are used for site-to-site recovery and load balancing between data center sites.

Growing community of inventors

Richardson, TX, United States of America

Zeeshan Naseh