Cisco Cisco VPN Acceleration Module Guia De Informação
Q&A
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
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Cisco Data Center Interconnect
Q. What is Cisco
®
Data Center Interconnect (DCI)?
A. Cisco DCI is a set of solutions for connecting two or more peer data centers.
Q. What is data center Layer 2 interconnect?
A. Data center Layer 2 interconnect extends the Layer 2 infrastructure existing within a single data center to span
two or more peer data centers.
Q. Why do I need to extend Layer 2 across multiple data centers?
A. The business requirements underlying the need for data center interconnect typically are enterprise
applications, which demand a specific type of interconnect solution over the WAN core. For example, data
center applications such as geoclustering, VMware vMotion, and so on require extension of an existing
Layer 2 LAN segment within a data center across the WAN interconnect to one or more peer data centers.
Q. What solutions are available on the Cisco Catalyst
®
6500 Series Switches to extend Layer 2 across
data centers?
A. The available design solutions for extending Layer 2 across the data center are based on the transport
mechanism used in the interconnect. The interconnect or WAN may use different underlying transport
infrastructures to provide Layer 2 interconnectivity. The typical transport types used in the WAN interconnect
are:
●
Dark fiber
●
Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS)
●
IP
Q. Does the Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series offer solutions for each of these transport mechanisms?
A. Yes. The Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series offers fundamentally two solutions for Layer 2 interconnectivity: a virtual
switching system (VSS) solution if a customer has access to dark fiber and Any Transport over MPLS (ATOM).
ATOM traffic can also be encapsulated with generic routing encapsulation (ATOMoGRE), which allows
extension of the Layer 2 VLAN infrastructure over an interconnect, which may be based on IP or MPLS.
Both the VSS-based dark fiber solution and the ATOM and ATOMoGRE solution on the Cisco Catalyst 6500
Series are redundant, scalable, and secure.
Q. What is the VSS-based dark fiber-based solution?
A. When a data center customer has access to dark fiber, one option is to take advantage of dark fiber solutions
based on the VSS available on the Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series.
Q. What is Advanced Virtual Private LAN Services (A-VPLS)?
A. A-VPLS is an enhancement to VPLS specifically for data center deployments, A-VPLS offers a suite of
features:
●
Enhanced VPLS traffic load-balancing capabilities
●
VPLS configuration simplification
●
Enhanced VPLS availability