Creating a fully scalable, seamless network was imperative for Flex’s continued success.
The Project
Flex’s data centers in both Sacramento and Hong Kong are responsible for over $23 billion of their revenue. Each one of their customers in their factories around the world relies on secure access to these data centers in order to share designs and create products for manufacturing.
Our Key Challenge
Our key challenge was upgrading their legacy data center infrastructure that was not programable to a fully software-defined next-gen network. We had to migrate from legacy and proprietary technology to a full ecosystem that was agile, flexible, secure, and scalable. This was important to meet the increased customer demand while maintaining security for intellectual property.
The new design is managed by an automation stack driven by Ansible and integrations between ticket systems such as service now and network components such as switches, routers, and firewalls. This requires minimal network admin and engineering time for deploying configurations as all configuration tasks are carried out automatically.
Our Pathway to a Solution
Step 1
The updated Data Center needed to seamlessly connect the Flex business, its customers, and its partners.
Step 2
In testing, we used VXLAN on a massive scale to achieve layer 3 networking, while still supporting layer 2 at the rack level. This was important as layer 2 segmentation was widely implemented in Flex’s server infrastructure requiring layer 2 hand off to be available at the rack level.
Step 3
Then we built orchestration workflows for automating network operations using available modules to automate day to day network operation tasks.
Creating a Custom Solution for Flex
Throughout the project, the Armature sales and engineering teams collaborated to ensure they had a clear vision of what needed to be accomplished in the short amount of time. The Armature team always went above and beyond to ensure that Flex was satisfied with their services by working after and beyond the hours they were assigned.”
Ongoing Support for Legacy Infrastructure
We created a full layer 3 network with VXLAN to support the current server layer.
Centralize Management
We centralized management of all the network components for configuration and monitoring, using Arista Cloudvision and Palo Alto Panorama.
Automate Security Provisioning
We fully-automated networking and security-provisioning system using Ansible, with integrations built into ServiceNow and networking components to provision ethernet ports and security policies on demand.
We are good at remediating and making sure our project is done successfully and on time. This is because our engineers are experienced in solving the unexpected problems originating from the legacy systems. We believe that our success is our customer’s success, which is why fixing problems that arise after the deployment is just as important as delivering the project itself.
– Jacob Elziq, CEO