Wholesale and Distribution

Modern network architecture to meet evolving customer needs

World Wide Technology (WWT) is one of Cisco's largest partners, and is also a Cisco customer, taking advantage of the entire portfolio of Cisco hardware and software solutions in house, while also making them available to a large global customer base spanning virtually every major industry.

The company's Advanced Technology Center (ATC) consists of multiple large data centers that are used by customers around the world. Available from anywhere at any time, the ATC combines cutting-edge technology with expert guidance to empower customers to design, build, test, evaluate, and implement the technology solutions that best meet their unique needs.

With the technology ecosystem evolving at breakneck speed, WWT recognized that the ATC's legacy network architecture needed to be replaced with modern VXLAN-based and enhanced classic LAN-based architectures. These provide the advanced capabilities and flexibility to support the full spectrum of innovative new use cases needed to meet current and future customer needs.

According to Nathan Litz, Lead Architect of the ATC, re-architecting the network with the full suite of Cisco Nexus hardware and software solutions, including Cisco Nexus Dashboard, Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller, Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches, and Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights, was the best path forward.

"As a leader in data center networking," he explains, "we wanted to put Cisco architecture into our data centers to support not only our customers, but all of our core connectivity as well."

Cisco Nexus Dashboard provides centralized management of network infrastructure throughout the ATC. This single-platform approach makes it easy to manage and automate fabrics as part of day-to-day operations and provides access to key data insights and analytics that enable proactive planning. WWT's data center operations group has realized significant time savings by using Cisco tools to automate the configuration of interfaces, rather than using error-prone manual configuration methods.

"We use Nexus Dashboard to quickly deploy a lot of large, complex, architectures throughout multiple data centers," says Litz. "And then after that, we use the Cisco Day 2 Operations service or Nexus Dashboard Insights for traffic analytics to proactively plan for expansion."

AI workloads and the data center of the future

At any given time, the ATC has as many as 200 different paid customer engagements on-the-go across its data center infrastructure. Not surprisingly, a key challenge for WWT is being able to process an almost endless variety of workloads for these engagements.

With its new Cisco data center network, the company now has the flexibility it needs to support a full range of diverse customer requirements. Increasingly, this involves handling more high-performance computing use cases and processing growing volumes of AI workloads. WWT has seen customer satisfaction increase significantly as customers benefit from a massive increase in bandwidth with the ability to quickly and easily configure their own interfaces using automation.

To accelerate AI solutions development and test proofs of concept, customers can take advantage of the ATC's AI Proving Ground, a unique lab environment that gives them access to the world's leading AI technologies. For WWT, the AI Proving Ground provides a controlled environment for WWT to develop a better understanding of the new data center requirements, as well as the economic and ecological impacts of new energy-hungry AI workloads, especially power consumption and cooling requirements, which are significant concerns for the company moving forward.

The Cisco Nexus Dashboard suite of products, including Nexus Dashboard Insights, provides WWT with extensive flow and telemetry data, including temperature data for network hardware. WWT is using this data to plan proactively for meeting future power and cooling requirements in its data centers and the buildings that house them as customers continue to move forward on their AI journeys.

As it makes plans to continue expanding the ATC with additional data centers, WWT will continue to look to Cisco and its other original equipment manufacturing (OEM) partners to help make these plans a reality.

"We currently have five on-premises physical data centers," explains Litz. "We're going to be expanding that to a few new ones in the future, one of which will be dedicated to high-performance computing. That will truly be the data center of the future with advanced power and cooling mechanisms supported by our OEM partners."

An invaluable partner for accelerating innovation

Being able to draw on Cisco's experience and expertise was instrumental for WWT as it navigated the transition from legacy infrastructure to Cisco-based network architecture. WWT continues to collaborate with the Cisco product and development teams to build custom applications using the Nexus Dashboard Open API. To date, these new applications have yielded significant time savings in ATC data center operations.

The close relationship and collaborative process with Cisco are invaluable for WWT. During deployment, Cisco provided early code coaching and mentoring through some of the more complex features of Nexus Dashboard. In turn, WWT provided feedback on how they use Nexus Dashboard in their operations. As Litz says, this specialized process has "made both of our roadmaps stronger."

Cisco has also helped WWT build out new architectures and complex network topologies that have reduced downtime for customers during the migration from the legacy network infrastructure and are also helping to support a wide variety of workloads in the ATC for specific customer engagements.

Looking ahead, while the WWT team has many of the skillsets required to move forward with its plans to build a high-performance data center, it will continue to rely on its close partnership with Cisco Customer Experience (CX) to bridge any gaps that may arise.