Chris Crosby gave a thought leadership presentation on “Understanding Hyperscale Campus Compartmentalizations”

One of the great observations Chris discussed is when a redundancy of 2 is not enough. Really need 3. Ideally 5.

Huh?

Consider the below network mesh image shows how 2 connections would not be enough.

How do you compartmentalize the stuff that runs on the intermesh network. The below slide goes through the logical and physical elements to support the network mesh.

So What do you do? Chris presents the idea of Intermeshed Networking applied to the physical building.

Consider Chris has spent much of his time in the past building huge data centers while at Digital Realty. In 2011 is when Chris left Digital. Think about how much the data center environment has changed in these 6 years. The physical data center have not changed much for many, but what is in the data center has changed in ways like Network Fabrics. And now Chris is saying that there are limits to giant buildings that need to be designed for Intermeshed Networking and there are many details in the physical and logical design.

Chris’s summary is something that interestingly are conclusions I have arrived at my own, but haven’t taken the time to write about publicly.

When you take the Intermesh within the data center it is a logical step to apply it to the portfolio of facilities and how they work in a mesh.

Here is what a data center network fabric looks like. This is what data centers are being designed for.