Network Datacenter Engineer (FR or NL+ENG) - Long Term Mission in Brussels

Task description
Help design a cloud-connected, future-ready datacenter network, taking into account the existing situation (brownfield), budget constraints, and the following:

• Deterministic performance for east-west traffic (VMware, Oracle RAC/Exadata, AI training, Kubernetes/OpenShift)

• Secure segmentation and micro-segmentation in line with Zero Trust principles

• High availability and disaster recovery for mission-critical operations

• Hybrid cloud integration with Azure on-prem (e.g. Azure Stack HCI, Azure Arc)

Deliverable
An approved target architecture and a 3-year roadmap for DC networks covering VMware, Oracle, SAN, AI and Azure on-prem, with clear standards and a migration plan accompanied by a decision log (ADR) recording considerations, risks and justifications. Including:

1. Current-state assessment: inventory of network environments (underlay/overlay/SAN/DMZ/edge), dependencies, performance baselines, risks

2. Target architecture: reference network architectures for VMware, Oracle, SAN or vSAN, AI and Azure on-prem; segmentation model, HA/DR designs

3. Technology choice and HL roadmap: evaluation of fabrics (EVPN/VXLAN vs ACI or other), AI-interconnect (Ethernet RoCE vs InfiniBand), SAN evolution (FC vs NVMe vs RoCEv2), microsegmentation, Azure Stack HCI/Arc integration

4. Security by Design: Zero Trust guidelines, microsegmentation policy, privileged access management, traffic encryption, secrets management

5. Performance and capacity analysis: throughput/latency, vMotion, vSAN, backup impact, AI training jobs; QoS and anti-congestion strategies

6. Resilience and disaster recovery: active-active datacenters, stretched clusters, runbooks, failover testing

7. Interoperability and integration: VMware/NSX coexistence, Oracle RAC/Exadata, SAN zoning, AI cluster interconnect, Azure on-prem/hybrid connectivity

Skills

• Datacenter networks: in-depth L2-L3 knowledge; underlay/leaf-spine (L3 ECMP, EVPN/VXLAN, ACI fabrics); 25/100/200/400 GbE evolution

• Virtualization and overlay: VMware vSphere/VCF, NSX/NSX-T; distributed firewall and microsegmentation

• Oracle platforms: Oracle RAC interconnect and Exadata networks; Data Guard latency/bandwidth requirements; backup and restore data flows

• Storage and SAN: dual-fabric Fibre Channel (Gen 6/7), zoning, vSAN; NVMe (FC, RDMA, TCP); multipathing and lossless Ethernet (PFC/ETS)

• AI workloads: GPU-fabrics (InfiniBand or RoCEv2 Ethernet); RDMA/NCCL optimization; telemetry, data staging, north-south traffic

• Azure Hybrid: Azure Stack HCI, Azure Arc, AKS on HCI; private connectivity (ExpressRoute); identity and policy extension

• Security and compliance: Zero Trust architecture; encryption (MACsec, IPsec, SSL); PKI/KMS; ISO 27001, NIS2, GDPR compliance

• Language 1 (NL or FR): C2 (highly complex proficiency)

• Language 2 (the other): B1 (intermediate)

• Language 3 (English): B1 (intermediate)

• Datacenter network architecture: min 2 years

• Cisco ACI multi-Fabric: min 2 years

• Azure cloud and on-prem (hybrid) implementations: min 2 years

• SAN networking: min 2 years

• VMware ESX and NSX-T: min 2 years

• BGP, VXLAN, EVPN, RoCEv2, MPLS network protocols: min 5 years

• Professional technical IT experience: min 10 years