Financial Services Group

Challenge

A financial services group's core datacenter network was approaching end-of-support, with a proprietary NOS that locked upgrade cadence to one vendor's roadmap.

Regulatory expectations required documented failover behavior and deterministic recovery paths — hard to evidence on an aging, mixed-generation core.

Solution

Rebuilt the core as a spine-leaf fabric on S6700-32CQ and S6700-64CQ switches running SONiC, using M-LAG and VXLAN/EVPN for deterministic failover domains.

Qualified the full optics path — SF516M multimode within rows, SF515A single-mode for building interconnects — from the same vendor as the switching.

Used SONiC telemetry and sFlow exports to evidence traffic and failover behavior to compliance reviewers.

Results

• Core modernized onto an open NOS with exit flexibility and a refresh cadence the group controls.
• Fabric failover domains documented against M-LAG and EVPN convergence behavior for audit.
• Single-vendor optics and switching removed the cross-vendor TAC loop that had slowed the previous core's incidents.