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 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.
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.
Facilities
Data center facilities are custom-designed 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.
Computing Hardware
Much of the heavy processing in data centers are 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 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 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.
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.
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
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 Network File 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.