The challenge
Vodafone’s UK and European core data centers needed modern, policy-driven fabrics that could host production, DMZ and user workloads securely, work with the existing VMware NSX-T and HPE estates, and connect to three public clouds.
What I did
- Led the design, deployment and operational handover of Cisco ACI fabrics for four large data centers, including Multi-Pod.
- Designed tenant-based segmentation that separates production, DMZ and user zones with ACI contracts and firewalls.
- Architected the hybrid model joining ACI with VMware NSX-T and AWS, Azure and GCP for application mobility and micro-segmentation.
- Integrated HPE switching with both the ACI fabric and NSX-T.
- Ran day-to-day operations and P1/P2 incident response across Nexus, BGP/OSPF, vPC, VXLAN, firewalls and F5 load balancers.
Outcome
- Four core data centers running on consistent, policy-driven ACI fabrics.
- Clear security zones aligned with Vodafone’s cloud strategy and cyber-security compliance.
- A single network model across on-premises virtualization and three public clouds.
Specific designs, addressing and volumes are confidential and left out.