DATACENTER NETWORK ARCHITECT - Freelance

Help design a cloud-connected, future-proof datacenter network, taking into account the existing situation, budget constraints and the following elements:

• Deterministic performance for east-west traffic (VMware, Oracle RAC/Exadata, AI training, Kubernetes/OpenShift).

• Secure segmentation and micro-segmentation in line with Zero Trust principles.

• High availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) for critical operations.

• Hybrid cloud integration with Azure On-Premises (e.g. Azure Stack HCI, Azure Arc).

RESPONSIBILITIES:

Deliver an approved target architecture and a three-year roadmap for DC networks covering VMware, Oracle, SAN, AI and Azure On-Prem, with clear standards and a migration plan supported by an Architecture Decision Record (ADR) log documenting considerations, risks and justifications. This includes:

1. Current-state assessment: inventory of network environments (underlay/overlay/SAN/DMZ/edge), dependencies, performance baselines and risks.

2. Target architecture: reference network architectures for VMware, Oracle, SAN or vSAN, AI and Azure On-Prem, taking into account the segmentation model and HA/DR designs.

3. Technology choices and high-level roadmap: evaluation of fabrics (EVPN/VXLAN vs. ACI or other), AI interconnect (RoCE Ethernet vs. InfiniBand), SAN evolution (FC vs. NVMe vs. RoCEv2), micro-segmentation solutions, and Azure Stack HCI/Arc network integration.

4. Security by Design: Zero Trust guidelines, micro-segmentation policy, privileged access management, traffic encryption and secrets management.

5. Performance and capacity analysis: throughput/latency, vMotion, vSAN, impact of backups, AI training jobs; QoS (Quality of Service) and congestion management strategies.

6. Resilience and disaster recovery: active-active datacenters, stretched clusters (where applicable), runbook design and failover testing.

7. Interoperability and integration: coexistence of VMware/NSX, Oracle RAC/Exadata, SAN zoning, AI cluster interconnect, and Azure On-Prem/hybrid connectivity.

SKILLS:

Datacenter networking knowledge and experience

• In-depth knowledge of L2-L3 networking.

• Underlay/Leaf-Spine: L3 ECMP, EVPN/VXLAN and ACI fabrics; evolution to 25/100/200/400 GbE.

Virtualization and overlay knowledge and experience

• VMware vSphere / VCF, NSX/NSX-T.

• Centralized/distributed firewalling and micro-segmentation.

Oracle platforms knowledge

• Oracle RAC interconnect and Exadata networking.

• Latency/bandwidth requirements for Data Guard.

• Backup and restore flows.

Storage and SAN experience

• Fibre Channel dual fabric (Gen 6/7), zoning, vSAN.

• NVMe (FC, RDMA, TCP).

• Multipathing and lossless Ethernet (PFC/ETS) where applicable.

AI workloads experience

• GPU fabrics: InfiniBand or RoCEv2 Ethernet.

• RDMA/NCCL optimization.

• Telemetry, data staging and north-south traffic.

Azure Hybrid experience

• Azure Stack HCI, Azure Arc, AKS on HCI.

• Private connectivity (ExpressRoute).

• Identity and policy extension.

Security and compliance knowledge

• Zero Trust architecture.

• Encryption (MACsec, IPsec, SSL).

• PKI/KMS.

• Compliance: ISO 27001, NIS2, GDPR.