Dissecting the Cloud: Trials and Tribulations Uncovered While Building a Multisite Data Center

University Information Technology at Tufts began a project in fall 2010 to build a new multisite data center. On the surface, this seemed simple. However, the initiative quickly dovetailed into various challenging discussions revolving around optical designs, subnetting, load balancing, network address translation, and a host of other areas that were not straightforward. In the end, we came up with a L2/L3 "hybrid" networking solution to accomplish our many network needs. This presentation will highlight the hurdles we encountered, the choices we made, and ultimately what we were able to present to our user community: a resilient and redundant data center.