Data center Network Architect - Freelance

Daily rate: 700 - 750€

Context

Public-sector contract for the ICT department of a major Belgian infrastructure operator, covering the design of the data center network architecture. The mission concerns critical VMware, Oracle, SAN, AI and hybrid Azure environments, in a context of data center network transformation and security hardening.

Mission

Design a future-proof, cloud-connected data center network that takes the existing environment and budget constraints into account. Deliver an approved target architecture and a three-year roadmap for the data center networks.

Responsibilities

- Support the design of a cloud-connected, future-ready data center network, considering:

- deterministic performance for east-west traffic

- secure segmentation and micro-segmentation aligned with Zero Trust principles

- high availability and disaster recovery for critical operations

- hybrid cloud integration with Azure on-premises

- Deliver an approved target architecture and a three-year roadmap: define clear standards, build a migration plan, and document considerations, risks and rationale in an architecture decision record (ADR).

- Assess the current state: inventory the underlay, overlay, SAN, DMZ and edge environments, identify dependencies, establish performance baselines and identify risks.

- Define the target architecture: reference network architectures for VMware, Oracle, SAN or vSAN, AI and Azure on-premises, including the segmentation model and HA/DR designs.

- Select technologies and draft a high-level roadmap: assess EVPN/VXLAN fabrics versus ACI or alternatives, RoCE Ethernet versus InfiniBand for AI interconnect, FC SAN evolution versus NVMe and RoCEv2, micro-segmentation solutions, and Azure Stack HCI and Arc networking.

- Apply security by design: Zero Trust guidelines, micro-segmentation policy, privileged access, traffic encryption and secrets management.

- Analyse performance and capacity: throughput and latency, vMotion and vSAN, backup impact, AI training workloads, QoS and congestion-management strategies.

- Plan resilience and disaster recovery: active-active data centers, stretched clusters where relevant, runbooks and failover tests.

- Ensure interoperability: coexistence of VMware/NSX, Oracle RAC/Exadata, SAN zoning and AI cluster interconnect, plus Azure on-premises and hybrid connectivity.

The mission is structured around architecture deliverables, the roadmap and the decision log (ADR).

Working conditions

- Start: 01/12/2026. End: 30/11/2030.

- On-call availability required.