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Data Center Gateway

Deliver reliable, scalable and secure data center interconnect and peering 

What is a data center gateway?

A data center gateway is a carrier-grade router that is designed to handle advanced networking functions for connecting a data center fabric to the outside world. The data center gateway connects to the spine layer in a mesh topology in a way that’s similar to a leaf switch. 

The Nokia Data Center Gateway enables you to provide high-performance connectivity between data centers, public clouds, the wide area network (WAN) and the internet. It supports a comprehensive set of use cases, including data center interconnect (DCI), data center gateway for internet peering and multi-cloud interconnect.

Data center interconnect

You can achieve data center interconnect, or DCI, by using the WAN to connect multiple data center fabrics. The transport and service technologies used in the data center and the WAN are typically different, so some level of interworking is required. 

Our Data Center Gateway lets you support DCI over IP-only, MPLS (LDP, RSVP, SR-MPLS) or SRv6 tunnels in the WAN. It also provides seamless interworking for different services such as EVPN to IP-VPN/VPLS and offers the option to encrypt traffic when it exits the data center fabric while preserving the different classes of service. 

With our solution, you can use the Nokia 7750 Service Router (SR), powered by FP routing silicon, as a data center gateway. The 7750 SR delivers best-in-class QoS, buffering and low-latency line-rate traffic encryption with MACsec at layer 2 or ANYsec at layer 2/3 without any performance degradation. It also provides interworking features that leverage our extensive years of experience in IP networking and service delivery. 

Our Data Center Gateway also enables you to scale and simplify the integration between the data center fabric and the WAN by collapsing the border leaf and the Provider Edge (PE) router into a single device. 

All of these capabilities enable you to enhance overall network performance and deliver a superior user experience by ensuring that critical applications receive the necessary bandwidth with minimal delay.

Data center gateway for internet peering

You can enhance your data center fabric’s connection to the outside world through internet peering. Various Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) sessions are crucial for selectively choosing the optimal routes to reach end users. 

With internet access, it’s essential to protect your data center against malicious attacks and unauthorized access attempts. By bundling advanced distributed denial of service (DDoS) mitigation mechanisms at the entry points with extensive traffic filtering and policy-based redirection, you can create a reliable and secure data center network infrastructure.

Our Data Center Gateway provides a robust, highly scalable and field-proven BGP protocol implementation with advanced parameter tuning capabilities that meet the needs of large-scale data center and service provider networks. By complementing these capabilities with advanced DDoS mitigation features, it provides a comprehensive solution for bridging your data center with the outside world.

Multi-cloud interconnect

Our Data Center Gateway lets you seamlessly, efficiently and reliably interconnect multiple data center fabrics. You can use these capabilities to: 

  • Connect on-premises clouds to public clouds with a hybrid approach that combines the strengths of both. The Data Center Gateway can provide a dedicated direct network connection or more advanced connectivity using the GRE or IPsec tunnel encapsulation needed to reach public clouds.
  • Provide edge cloud connectivity for training AI models and tuning data centers for AI deployments. Edge clouds built closer to end users or devices minimize the data latency and bandwidth requirements for AI inference and enable the creation of secure, isolated environments. The Data Center Gateway supports these deployments with fine-grained control and policy enforcement.

The Data Center Gateway’s leading software features and advanced silicon capabilities complement the Nokia Data Center Fabric portfolio. They enable you to build scalable data center network solutions to meet growing demand for reliable and secure connectivity.

We design our 7750 SR routers to handle critical networking functions and provide the speed, capacity, power efficiency, flexible capability and network security required for IP backbone connectivity, IP interconnection, IP DCI and IP peering roles.

Evolving data center interconnect with fiber optic infrastructure

Connecting data center fabrics using fiber optics allows you to increase bandwidth and guarantee performance. Coherent technology and Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) are enablers that can provide the reach and scale you need to connect multiple data center fabrics.

Our Data Center Gateway leverages the highest fill in the industry with pluggable digital coherent optics (DCOs), offering speeds ranging from 100G to 800G per DWDM wavelength for metro/regional data centers. Our coherent routing solution provides simplified IP-optical coordination based on standard transport interfaces.

Optical transponders complement the pluggable DCOs to help you meet increasing demands for capacity and reach. Our optical portfolio is tailored for metro, regional and long-haul DCI applications.

Key Data Center Gateway applications

  • Multi-domain interworking between the VxLAN tunnel data plane in the data center fabric and the IP-only, MPLS (LDP, RSVP, SR-MPLS) or SRv6 data plane in the WAN
  • Multi-VPN interworking between EVPN in modern data centers and IP-VPN or VPLS in legacy data centers
  • Internet connectivity using multiple BGP peering agreements for optimal traffic performance
  • Connecting public clouds to on-prem data centers to support a hybrid approach that combines the strengths of both
  • DDoS mitigation and traffic encryption to secure the data center fabric and ensure maximum availability

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