“Applying a Methodology to Network Design,” the Cisco Service-

Oriented Network Architecture (SONA) framework defines how enterprises can evolve toward intelligence in the network that optimizes applications, business processes, and resources. The Cisco Enterprise Data Center Architecture, based on SONA, provides organizations with a framework to address immediate data center demands for consolidation and business continuance while enabling emerging service-oriented architectures (SOA), virtualization, and on-demand computing technologies in the data center.

The Cisco Enterprise Data Center Architecture, as illustrated in Figure 3.11, aligns data center resources with business applications and provides multiple resources to end users in an enterprise.

The Cisco Enterprise Data Center Architecture has the following layers:

■ Networked Infrastructure layer: Meets all the bandwidth, latency, and protocol requirements for user-to-server, server-to-server, and server-to-storage connectivity and communications in a modular, hierarchical infrastructure.

■ Interactive Services layer: Provides the infrastructure services that ensure the fast and secure alignment of resources with application requirements and Cisco Application Networking Services that optimize application integration and the delivery of applications to end users.

WAAS = Wide-Area Application Services; RDMA = Remote Data Memory Access; SFS = Server Fabric Switching; MDS = Multilayer Directors and Fabric Switches; ONS = Optical Networking Solutions; DWDM = Dense Wave Division Multiplexing; SONET = Synchronous Optical Network; SDH = Synchronous Digital Hierarchy; FCIP = Fiber Channel over IP

The Cisco Enterprise Data Center Architecture provides a scalable foundation that allows data centers to host a variety of legacy and emerging systems and technologies, including the following:

■ N-tier applications: Secure network zones support two, three, or n-tier application environments with techniques that optimize application availability and server and storage utilization.

■ Web applications: Application acceleration and server optimization technologies provide improved scalability and delivery of web applications to end users, wherever they are.

■ Blade servers: As self-contained servers, blade servers, housed in a blade enclosure, have all the functional components required to be considered computers but have reduced physical components, so they require less space, power, and so forth. The Cisco Enterprise Data Center Architecture provides an intelligent network foundation using integrated Ethernet and InfiniBand switching technology that helps optimize blade server availability, security, and performance.

■ Clustering, high-performance computing and grid: The Cisco high-performance data, server, and storage switching solutions, whether based on Ethernet, InfiniBand, or Fiber Channel, enable the deployment of data- and I/O-intensive applications that make use of these distributed compute and storage architectures.

■ SOA and web service: The Cisco Enterprise Data Center Architecture facilitates the reliable, secure, and rapid deployment of an SOA by enabling dynamic deployment and scaling of secure infrastructures and by enhancing application integration with message-based services.

■ Mainframe computing: Cisco offers a comprehensive set of technologies supporting Systems Network Architecture (SNA), SNA-to-IP migration, fiber connection, and native IP mainframe services.