5.2. DATA CENTER TECHNOLOGY
Grouping IT resources in close proximity with one another, rather than having them geographically dispersed, allows for
power sharing, higher efficiency in shared IT resource usage, and improved accessibility for IT personnel. These are the
advantages that naturally popularized the data center concept. Modern data centers exist as specialized IT infrastructure
Chapter 5. Cloud-Enabling Technology – Cloud Computing: Concepts, Technology & Architecture
https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/cloud-computing-concepts/9780133387568/ch05.html[11/15/2017 5:49:24 PM]
used to house centralized IT resources, such as servers, databases, networking and telecommunication devices, and
software systems.
Data centers are typically comprised of the following technologies and components:
Virtualization
Data centers consist of both physical and virtualized IT resources. The physical IT resource layer refers to the facility
infrastructure that houses computing/networking systems and equipment, together with hardware systems and their
operating systems (Figure 5.7). The resource abstraction and control of the virtualization layer is comprised of operational
and management tools that are often based on virtualization platforms that abstract the physical computing and
networking IT resources as virtualized components that are easier to allocate, operate, release, monitor, and control.
Chapter 5. Cloud-Enabling Technology – Cloud Computing: Concepts, Technology & Architecture
https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/cloud-computing-concepts/9780133387568/ch05.html[11/15/2017 5:49:24 PM]
Figure 5.7. The common components of a data center working together to provide virtualized IT resources
supported by physical IT resources.
Virtualization components are discussed separately in the upcoming Virtualization Technology section.
Standardization and Modularity
Data centers are built upon standardized commodity hardware and designed with modular architectures, aggregating
multiple identical building blocks of facility infrastructure and equipment to support scalability, growth, and speedy
hardware replacements. Modularity and standardization are key requirements for reducing investment and operational
costs as they enable economies of scale for the procurement, acquisition, deployment, operation, and maintenance
processes.
Chapter 5. Cloud-Enabling Technology – Cloud Computing: Concepts, Technology & Architecture
https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/cloud-computing-concepts/9780133387568/ch05.html[11/15/2017 5:49:24 PM]
Common virtualization strategies and the constantly improving capacity and performance of physical devices both favor
IT resource consolidation, since fewer physical components are needed to support complex configurations. Consolidated
IT resources can serve different systems and be shared among different cloud consumers.
Automation
Data centers have specialized platforms that automate tasks like provisioning, configuration, patching, and monitoring
without supervision. Advances in data center management platforms and tools leverage autonomic computing
technologies to enable self-configuration and self-recovery. Autonomic computing is briefly discussed in Appendix E.
Remote Operation and Management
Most of the operational and administrative tasks of IT resources in data centers are commanded through the network’s
remote consoles and management systems. Technical personnel are not required to visit the dedicated rooms that house
servers, except to perform highly specific tasks, such as equipment handling and cabling or hardware-level installation
and maintenance.
High Availability
Since any form of data center outage significantly impacts business continuity for the organizations that use their
services, data centers are designed to operate with increasingly higher levels of redundancy to sustain availability. Data
centers usually have redundant, uninterruptable power supplies, cabling, and environmental control subsystems in
anticipation of system failure, along with communication links and clustered hardware for load balancing.
Security-Aware Design, Operation, and Management
Requirements for security, such as physical and logical access controls and data recovery strategies, need to be thorough
and comprehensive for data centers, since they are centralized structures that store and process business data.
Due to the sometimes prohibitive nature of building and operating on-premise data centers, outsourcing data centerbased
IT resources has been a common industry practice for decades. However, the outsourcing models often required
long-term consumer commitment and usually could not provide elasticity, issues that a typical cloud can address via
inherent features, such as ubiquitous access, on-demand provisioning, rapid elasticity, and pay-per-use.
Facilities
Chapter 5. Cloud-Enabling Technology – Cloud Computing: Concepts, Technology & Architecture
https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/cloud-computing-concepts/9780133387568/ch05.html[11/15/2017 5:49:24 PM]
Data center facilities are custom-designed locations that are outfitted with specialized computing, storage, and network
equipment. These facilities have several functional layout areas, as well as various power supplies, cabling, and
environmental control stations that regulate heating, ventilation, air conditioning, fire protection, and other related
subsystems.
The site and layout of a given data center facility are typically demarcated into segregated spaces. Appendix D provides a
breakdown of the common rooms and utilities found in data centers.
Computing Hardware
Much of the heavy processing in data centers is often executed by standardized commodity servers that have substantial
computing power and storage capacity. Several computing hardware technologies are integrated into these modular
servers, such as:
• rackmount form factor server design composed of standardized racks with interconnects for power, network, and
internal cooling
• support for different hardware processing architectures, such as x86-32bits, x86-64, and RISC
• a power-efficient multi-core CPU architecture that houses hundreds of processing cores in a space as small as a single
unit of standardized racks
• redundant and hot-swappable components, such as hard disks, power supplies, network interfaces, and storage
controller cards
Computing architectures such as blade server technologies use rack-embedded physical interconnections (blade
enclosures), fabrics (switches), and shared power supply units and cooling fans. The interconnections enhance intercomponent
networking and management while optimizing physical space and power. These systems typically support
individual server hot-swapping, scaling, replacement, and maintenance, which benefits the deployment of fault-tolerant
systems that are based on computer clusters.
Contemporary computing hardware platforms generally support industry-standard and proprietary operational and
management software systems that configure, monitor, and control hardware IT resources from remote management
consoles. With a properly established management console, a single operator can oversee hundreds to thousands of
physical servers, virtual servers, and other IT resources.
Chapter 5. Cloud-Enabling Technology – Cloud Computing: Concepts, Technology & Architecture
https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/cloud-computing-concepts/9780133387568/ch05.html[11/15/2017 5:49:24 PM]
Storage Hardware
Data centers have specialized storage systems that maintain enormous amounts of digital information in order to fulfill
considerable storage capacity needs. These storage systems are containers housing numerous hard disks that are
organized into arrays.
Storage systems usually involve the following technologies:
• Hard Disk Arrays – These arrays inherently divide and replicate data among multiple physical drives, and increase
performance and redundancy by including spare disks. This technology is often implemented using redundant arrays of
independent disks (RAID) schemes, which are typically realized through hardware disk array controllers.
• I/O Caching – This is generally performed through hard disk array controllers, which enhance disk access times and
performance by data caching.
• Hot-Swappable Hard Disks – These can be safely removed from arrays without requiring prior powering down.
• Storage Virtualization – This is realized through the use of virtualized hard disks and storage sharing.
• Fast Data Replication Mechanisms – These include snapshotting, which is saving a virtual machine’s memory into a
hypervisor-readable file for future reloading, and volume cloning, which is copying virtual or physical hard disk volumes
and partitions.
Storage systems encompass tertiary redundancies, such as robotized tape libraries, which are used as backup and
recovery systems that typically rely on removable media. This type of system can exist as a networked IT resource or
direct-attached storage (DAS), in which a storage system is directly connected to the computing IT resource using a host
bus adapter (HBA). In the former case, the storage system is connected to one or more IT resources through a network.
Networked storage devices usually fall into one of the following categories:
• Storage Area Network (SAN) – Physical data storage media are connected through a dedicated network and provide
block-level data storage access using industry standard protocols, such as the Small Computer System Interface (SCSI).
• Network-Attached Storage (NAS) – Hard drive arrays are contained and managed by this dedicated device, which
connects through a network and facilitates access to data using file-centric data access protocols like the Network File
Chapter 5. Cloud-Enabling Technology – Cloud Computing: Concepts, Technology & Architecture
https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/cloud-computing-concepts/9780133387568/ch05.html[11/15/2017 5:49:24 PM]
System (NFS) or Server Message Block (SMB).
NAS, SAN, and other more advanced storage system options provide fault tolerance in many components through
controller redundancy, cooling redundancy, and hard disk arrays that use RAID storage technology.
Network Hardware
Data centers require extensive network hardware in order to enable multiple levels of connectivity. For a simplified
version of networking infrastructure, the data center is broken down into five network subsystems, followed by a
summary of the most common elements used for their implementation.
Carrier and External Networks Interconnection
A subsystem related to the internetworking infrastructure, this interconnection is usually comprised of backbone routers
that provide routing between external WAN connections and the data center’s LAN, as well as perimeter network security
devices such as firewalls and VPN gateways.
Web-Tier Load Balancing and Acceleration
This subsystem comprises Web acceleration devices, such as XML pre-processors, encryption/decryption appliances, and
layer 7 switching devices that perform content-aware routing.
LAN Fabric
The LAN fabric constitutes the internal LAN and provides high-performance and redundant connectivity for all of the
data center’s network-enabled IT resources. It is often implemented with multiple network switches that facilitate
network communications and operate at speeds of up to ten gigabits per second. These advanced network switches can
also perform several virtualization functions, such as LAN segregation into VLANs, link aggregation, controlled routing
between networks, load balancing, and failover.
SAN Fabric
Related to the implementation of storage area networks (SANs) that provide connectivity between servers and storage
systems, the SAN fabric is usually implemented with Fibre Channel (FC), Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), and
InfiniBand network switches.
NAS Gateways
This subsystem supplies attachment points for NAS-based storage devices and implements protocol conversion hardware
Chapter 5. Cloud-Enabling Technology – Cloud Computing: Concepts, Technology & Architecture
https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/cloud-computing-concepts/9780133387568/ch05.html[11/15/2017 5:49:24 PM]
that facilitates data transmission between SAN and NAS devices.
Data center network technologies have operational requirements for scalability and high availability that are fulfilled by
employing redundant and/or fault-tolerant configurations. These five network subsystems improve data center
redundancy and reliability to ensure that they have enough IT resources to maintain a certain level of service even in the
face of multiple failures.
Ultra high-speed network optical links can be used to aggregate individual gigabit-per-second channels into single optical
fibers using multiplexing technologies like dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM). Spread over multiple
locations and used to interconnect server farms, storage systems, and replicated data centers, optical links improve
transfer speeds and resiliency.
Other Considerations
IT hardware is subject to rapid technological obsolescence, with lifecycles that typically last between five to seven years.
The on-going need to replace equipment frequently results in a mix of hardware whose heterogeneity can complicate the
entire data center’s operations and management (although this can be partially mitigated through virtualization).
Security is another major issue when considering the role of the data center and the vast quantities of data contained
within its doors. Even with extensive security precautions in place, housing data exclusively at one data center facility
means much more can be compromised by a successful security incursion than if data was distributed across individual
unlinked components.
Research Paper: Find a peer reviewed article in the following databases provided by the UC Library and write a 250-word paper reviewing the literature concerning Data Center Technology. Choose one of the technologies discussed in Chapter 5, Section 5.2 (Erl, 2014).
1- Virtualization — provide some flow chat also.
2- Standardization and Modularity
3- Automation
4- Remote Operation and Management
5- High Availability
6- Security-Aware Design, Operation, and Management
7- Facilities
Etc…
You may choose any scholarly peer reviewed articles and papers.
Use the following databases for your research:
· ACM Digital Library
· IEEE/IET Electronic Library
· SAGE Premier
Section 5.2
5.2. DATA CENTER TECHNOLOGY
Grouping IT resources in close proximity with one another, rather than having them geographically dispersed, allows for
power sharing, higher efficiency in shared IT resource usage, and improved accessibility for IT personnel. These are the
advantages that naturally popularized the data center concept. Modern data centers exist as specialized IT infrastructure
Chapter 5. Cloud-Enabling Technology – Cloud Computing: Concepts, Technology & Architecture
https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/cloud-computing-concepts/9780133387568/ch05.html[11/15/2017 5:49:24 PM]
used to house centralized IT resources, such as servers, databases, networking and telecommunication devices, and
software systems.
Data centers are typically comprised of the following technologies and components:
Virtualization
Data centers consist of both physical and virtualized IT resources. The physical IT resource layer refers to the facility
infrastructure that houses computing/networking systems and equipment, together with hardware systems and their
operating systems (Figure 5.7). The resource abstraction and control of the virtualization layer is comprised of operational
and management tools that are often based on virtualization platforms that abstract the physical computing and
networking IT resources as virtualized components that are easier to allocate, operate, release, monitor, and control.
Chapter 5. Cloud-Enabling Technology – Cloud Computing: Concepts, Technology & Architecture
https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/cloud-computing-concepts/9780133387568/ch05.html[11/15/2017 5:49:24 PM]
Figure 5.7. The common components of a data center working together to provide virtualized IT resources
supported by physical IT resources.
Virtualization components are discussed separately in the upcoming Virtualization Technology section.
Standardization and Modularity
Data centers are built upon standardized commodity hardware and designed with modular architectures, aggregating
multiple identical building blocks of facility infrastructure and equipment to support scalability, growth, and speedy
hardware replacements. Modularity and standardization are key requirements for reducing investment and operational
costs as they enable economies of scale for the procurement, acquisition, deployment, operation, and maintenance
processes.
Chapter 5. Cloud-Enabling Technology – Cloud Computing: Concepts, Technology & Architecture
https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/cloud-computing-concepts/9780133387568/ch05.html[11/15/2017 5:49:24 PM]
Common virtualization strategies and the constantly improving capacity and performance of physical devices both favor
IT resource consolidation, since fewer physical components are needed to support complex configurations. Consolidated
IT resources can serve different systems and be shared among different cloud consumers.
Automation
Data centers have specialized platforms that automate tasks like provisioning, configuration, patching, and monitoring
without supervision. Advances in data center management platforms and tools leverage autonomic computing
technologies to enable self-configuration and self-recovery. Autonomic computing is briefly discussed in Appendix E.
Remote Operation and Management
Most of the operational and administrative tasks of IT resources in data centers are commanded through the network’s
remote consoles and management systems. Technical personnel are not required to visit the dedicated rooms that house
servers, except to perform highly specific tasks, such as equipment handling and cabling or hardware-level installation
and maintenance.
High Availability
Since any form of data center outage significantly impacts business continuity for the organizations that use their
services, data centers are designed to operate with increasingly higher levels of redundancy to sustain availability. Data
centers usually have redundant, uninterruptable power supplies, cabling, and environmental control subsystems in
anticipation of system failure, along with communication links and clustered hardware for load balancing.
Security-Aware Design, Operation, and Management
Requirements for security, such as physical and logical access controls and data recovery strategies, need to be thorough
and comprehensive for data centers, since they are centralized structures that store and process business data.
Due to the sometimes prohibitive nature of building and operating on-premise data centers, outsourcing data centerbased
IT resources has been a common industry practice for decades. However, the outsourcing models often required
long-term consumer commitment and usually could not provide elasticity, issues that a typical cloud can address via
inherent features, such as ubiquitous access, on-demand provisioning, rapid elasticity, and pay-per-use.
Facilities
Chapter 5. Cloud-Enabling Technology – Cloud Computing: Concepts, Technology & Architecture
https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/cloud-computing-concepts/9780133387568/ch05.html[11/15/2017 5:49:24 PM]
Data center facilities are custom-designed locations that are outfitted with specialized computing, storage, and network
equipment. These facilities have several functional layout areas, as well as various power supplies, cabling, and
environmental control stations that regulate heating, ventilation, air conditioning, fire protection, and other related
subsystems.
The site and layout of a given data center facility are typically demarcated into segregated spaces. Appendix D provides a
breakdown of the common rooms and utilities found in data centers.
Computing Hardware
Much of the heavy processing in data centers is often executed by standardized commodity servers that have substantial
computing power and storage capacity. Several computing hardware technologies are integrated into these modular
servers, such as:
• rackmount form factor server design composed of standardized racks with interconnects for power, network, and
internal cooling
• support for different hardware processing architectures, such as x86-32bits, x86-64, and RISC
• a power-efficient multi-core CPU architecture that houses hundreds of processing cores in a space as small as a single
unit of standardized racks
• redundant and hot-swappable components, such as hard disks, power supplies, network interfaces, and storage
controller cards
Computing architectures such as blade server technologies use rack-embedded physical interconnections (blade
enclosures), fabrics (switches), and shared power supply units and cooling fans. The interconnections enhance intercomponent
networking and management while optimizing physical space and power. These systems typically support
individual server hot-swapping, scaling, replacement, and maintenance, which benefits the deployment of fault-tolerant
systems that are based on computer clusters.
Contemporary computing hardware platforms generally support industry-standard and proprietary operational and
management software systems that configure, monitor, and control hardware IT resources from remote management
consoles. With a properly established management console, a single operator can oversee hundreds to thousands of
physical servers, virtual servers, and other IT resources.
Chapter 5. Cloud-Enabling Technology – Cloud Computing: Concepts, Technology & Architecture
https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/cloud-computing-concepts/9780133387568/ch05.html[11/15/2017 5:49:24 PM]
Storage Hardware
Data centers have specialized storage systems that maintain enormous amounts of digital information in order to fulfill
considerable storage capacity needs. These storage systems are containers housing numerous hard disks that are
organized into arrays.
Storage systems usually involve the following technologies:
• Hard Disk Arrays – These arrays inherently divide and replicate data among multiple physical drives, and increase
performance and redundancy by including spare disks. This technology is often implemented using redundant arrays of
independent disks (RAID) schemes, which are typically realized through hardware disk array controllers.
• I/O Caching – This is generally performed through hard disk array controllers, which enhance disk access times and
performance by data caching.
• Hot-Swappable Hard Disks – These can be safely removed from arrays without requiring prior powering down.
• Storage Virtualization – This is realized through the use of virtualized hard disks and storage sharing.
• Fast Data Replication Mechanisms – These include snapshotting, which is saving a virtual machine’s memory into a
hypervisor-readable file for future reloading, and volume cloning, which is copying virtual or physical hard disk volumes
and partitions.
Storage systems encompass tertiary redundancies, such as robotized tape libraries, which are used as backup and
recovery systems that typically rely on removable media. This type of system can exist as a networked IT resource or
direct-attached storage (DAS), in which a storage system is directly connected to the computing IT resource using a host
bus adapter (HBA). In the former case, the storage system is connected to one or more IT resources through a network.
Networked storage devices usually fall into one of the following categories:
• Storage Area Network (SAN) – Physical data storage media are connected through a dedicated network and provide
block-level data storage access using industry standard protocols, such as the Small Computer System Interface (SCSI).
• Network-Attached Storage (NAS) – Hard drive arrays are contained and managed by this dedicated device, which
connects through a network and facilitates access to data using file-centric data access protocols like the Network File
Chapter 5. Cloud-Enabling Technology – Cloud Computing: Concepts, Technology & Architecture
https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/cloud-computing-concepts/9780133387568/ch05.html[11/15/2017 5:49:24 PM]
System (NFS) or Server Message Block (SMB).
NAS, SAN, and other more advanced storage system options provide fault tolerance in many components through
controller redundancy, cooling redundancy, and hard disk arrays that use RAID storage technology.
Network Hardware
Data centers require extensive network hardware in order to enable multiple levels of connectivity. For a simplified
version of networking infrastructure, the data center is broken down into five network subsystems, followed by a
summary of the most common elements used for their implementation.
Carrier and External Networks Interconnection
A subsystem related to the internetworking infrastructure, this interconnection is usually comprised of backbone routers
that provide routing between external WAN connections and the data center’s LAN, as well as perimeter network security
devices such as firewalls and VPN gateways.
Web-Tier Load Balancing and Acceleration
This subsystem comprises Web acceleration devices, such as XML pre-processors, encryption/decryption appliances, and
layer 7 switching devices that perform content-aware routing.
LAN Fabric
The LAN fabric constitutes the internal LAN and provides high-performance and redundant connectivity for all of the
data center’s network-enabled IT resources. It is often implemented with multiple network switches that facilitate
network communications and operate at speeds of up to ten gigabits per second. These advanced network switches can
also perform several virtualization functions, such as LAN segregation into VLANs, link aggregation, controlled routing
between networks, load balancing, and failover.
SAN Fabric
Related to the implementation of storage area networks (SANs) that provide connectivity between servers and storage
systems, the SAN fabric is usually implemented with Fibre Channel (FC), Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), and
InfiniBand network switches.
NAS Gateways
This subsystem supplies attachment points for NAS-based storage devices and implements protocol conversion hardware
Chapter 5. Cloud-Enabling Technology – Cloud Computing: Concepts, Technology & Architecture
https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/cloud-computing-concepts/9780133387568/ch05.html[11/15/2017 5:49:24 PM]
that facilitates data transmission between SAN and NAS devices.
Data center network technologies have operational requirements for scalability and high availability that are fulfilled by
employing redundant and/or fault-tolerant configurations. These five network subsystems improve data center
redundancy and reliability to ensure that they have enough IT resources to maintain a certain level of service even in the
face of multiple failures.
Ultra high-speed network optical links can be used to aggregate individual gigabit-per-second channels into single optical
fibers using multiplexing technologies like dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM). Spread over multiple
locations and used to interconnect server farms, storage systems, and replicated data centers, optical links improve
transfer speeds and resiliency.
Other Considerations
IT hardware is subject to rapid technological obsolescence, with lifecycles that typically last between five to seven years.
The on-going need to replace equipment frequently results in a mix of hardware whose heterogeneity can complicate the
entire data center’s operations and management (although this can be partially mitigated through virtualization).
Security is another major issue when considering the role of the data center and the vast quantities of data contained
within its doors. Even with extensive security precautions in place, housing data exclusively at one data center facility
means much more can be compromised by a successful security incursion than if data was distributed across individual
unlinked components.
