How the Data Center Has Evolved to Support the Modern Cloud

High-density computing. Switches, servers, storage devices, and racks are all now being designed to reduce the hardware footprint while still supporting more users. Let’s put this in perspective. A single Cisco UCS Chassis is capable of 160Gbps. From there, a single B200M3 blade can hold two Xeon 8-core processors (16 processing cores) and 768GB of RAM. Each blade can also support 2TB of storage and up to 32GB for flash memory. Now, if you place 8 of these blades into a single UCS Chassis, you can have 128 processing cores, over 6TB of RAM, and 16TB of storage. This means a lot of users, a lot of workload and plenty of room for expansion. This holds true for logical storage segmentation and better usage around other computing devices.

Data center efficiency. To help support larger amounts of users and a greater cloud environment, data center environments had to restructure some of their efficiency practices. Whether through a better analysis of their cooling capacity factors (CCF) or a better understanding around power utilization, modern technologies are allowing the data center to operate more optimally. Remember, with high-density computing we are potentially reducing the amount of hardware, but the hardware replacing older machines may require more cooling and energy. Data centers are now focusing on lowering their PUE and are looking for ways to cool and power their environments more optimally. As cloud continues to grow, there will be more emphasis on placing larger workloads with the data center environment.

Virtualization. Virtualization has helped reduce the amount of hardware within a data center. However, we’re not just discussing server virtualization any longer. New types of technologies have taken efficiency and data center distribution to a whole new level. Aside from server virtualization, IT professionals are now working with: Storage virtualization, user virtualization (hardware abstraction), network virtualization, storage virtualization, and security virtualization. All of these technologies strive to lessen the administrative burden while increasing efficiency, resiliency and improving business continuity.

WAN technologies. The Wide Area Network has helped the data center evolve in the sense that it brings facilities “close together.” Fewer hops and more connections are becoming available to enterprise data center environments where administrators are able to leverage new types of solutions to create an even more agile infrastructure. Having the capability to dedicate massive amounts of private bandwidth between regional data centers has proven to be a huge factor. Data center resiliency, recovery and manageability have become a little bit easier because of these new types of WAN services. Furthermore, site-to-site replication of data and massive systems is now happening at a much faster pace. Even now, big data has new types of developments to help large data center quantify and effectively distribute enormous data sets. Projects like the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) are helping data center realize that open-source technologies are powerful engines for data distribution and management.

Distributed data center management. This is, arguably, one of the biggest pieces of evidence in how well the data center has evolved to help support the modern cloud. Original data center infrastructure management (DCIM) solutions usually focused on singular data centers without too much visibility into other sites. Now, DCIM has evolved to help support a truly global data center environment. In fact, new terms are being used to help describe this new type of data center platform. Some have called it “data center virtualization” or the abstraction of the hardware layer within the data center itself. This means managing and fully optimizing processes running within the data center and then replicating it to other sites. In some other cases, a new type of management solution is starting to take form: The Data Center Operating System. The goal is to create a global computing and data center cluster which is capable of providing business intelligence, real-time visibility and control of the data center environment from a single pane of glass.