Data Center Infrastructure

Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Over the last three years, the name Server Room has completely vanished. Today most of the traditional server rooms have evolved in size, complexity, capacity, reliability, features and cost. To say it in one word, they have evolved into Data Centers. But with the increase in complexity, managing them efficiently has also become a challenge. However, to make things easier, quite a few technologies have come up.

Remote Management
The biggest change being observed in data centers is that they don't require physical presence of people. Remote management technologies have become so popular, that you can perform just about every management task remotely. Today even when you outsource your data center management to a third party, they do most of the management remotely. While there are many ways of doing remote management, two technologies deserve mention:

Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP): RDP has been there since the days of NT4, in the form of Terminal services. But it became popular with masses, when RDP features were integrated in Windows XP. Now it is widely used for remotely accessing desktops. The protocol consumes very less bandwidth by sending KVM signals alone over the network, giving you a feel of using the machine locally. Today, we have tools in Windows 2003 to access hundreds of RDP machines over the network simultaneously. We even have RDP clients for Linux or MAC, making it truly platform independent.

IPKVM: KVMs are pretty old and popular. But traditional KVMs have a limitation that you have to be physically present in the data center to use them. With IP-based KVMs, you can access multiple servers from anywhere in the world over the Internet. They allow multiple computers to be controlled remotely across a LAN or WAN using TCP/IP over either a web browser or a specially designed viewer. This is better than using RDP, because the software part is completely removed from the server side. So you can access any OS over IPKVM. In fact, you can go to the BIOS level and configure machines remotely. Other benefits are failsafe and manageability.

DCML
Data Center Markup Language (DCML) is an XML based language used to make different components of the data center talk to each other. Suppose you have a virtualization layer running on your consolidated data center and you need to provision different servers for different tasks. After a task is accomplished, you need to decommission it. So, whenever you create a new virtual server, all data is immediately sent to the data center management and monitoring console. This data will include the IP address of the machine, applications running, configuration and specs, and the contact person. So, without any human intervention, the management and monitoring console will be able to add this server into its list and start monitoring it. But the challenge here is to send information from the virtual server to the monitoring sever. This issue is tackled by DCML standards.

Disaster Recovery and BCP
Any discussion on data centers is incomplete without this topic. DR has been a trend for a long time, but now BCP is more important as that's ultimately the goal of doing DR. We've discussed it at length ina separate section in this cover story.

Blade Servers and Multi-Core
Blades have been around long enough, and therefore don't need any explanation. But with their costs coming down, and with new enterprise IT requirements like HPC, more data centers are going to need them. Likewise, with the introduction of multi-core processors on the x86 platform this year, server densities in the data center are going to shoot up like anything. These technologies will shoot up the compute capabilities of data centers like never before.

Power and Cooling
The key reason this becomes important is the rising density of equipment in the data center. Technologies l ike blades and multi-core not only pack huge amounts of computing power in very low space, they also result in tremendous heat generation in the data center. Therefore, you need appropriate cooling solutions to handle it. Today, most major power conditioning equipment companies have transitioned into becoming physical infrastructure management companies. Two prominent examples of this are APC and Emerson. Both offer not only UPSs, but also racks, power, and cooling solutions. Moreover, they offer solutions to remotely monitor and manage all their power and cooling equipment.

Server Racks
Believe it or not, but there's a lot of engineering that goes into server racks, so choosing the right one for your data center requires careful planning. To explain the case, we'll take a simple example of cooling from above. Many cooling solutions end up cooling the overall data center, so that the entire area becomes cool. As a result, you need warm clothes just to enter the data center. This is not right, because the actual objective is to cool servers and other equipment inside racks. You don't need cooling outside. This where a well-engineered rack comes in. Many rack vendors have worked out rack solutions that do just this. They don't let out the cooling from the racks, and ensure that cooling is done where it needs to be done. One company that comes to mind for this is President, which has racks that let you do this.

10 GbE
10 Gigabit Ethernet is the fastest Ethernet standard available till date. This provides ten times the speed of a standard Gbps network. The good thing is that it has been tested on both Fiber and copper. The latter will help data centers have high bandwidth at a low cost. 10G adds a sub-layer in the PHY (physical) layer of the OSI model, and uses a different encoding scheme (64/66b) for better error rate detection during data transfer. Plus, it supports full duplex transmission only. As 10G becomes more popular, several applications could use the extra bandwidth like video on demand, distributed computing, HPC deployments, medical imaging, and scientific simulation. Enterprises can set up buildings at larger distances within a campus and link them. This will facilitate bandwidth-intensive applications such as VoIP and digital video conferencing. Enterprises can locate their data centers, disaster recovery centers in a different city and yet get faster access. The cost of moving from Gigabit to 10 Gigabit will be two to three times more, but the performance gain might make it worth the effort. The cost of 10G products is expected to decrease.

Cat 7 cabling
The use of Cat 7 or category 7 cables is another emerging trend in data centers. It's essentially the latest and fastest Ethernet cabling standard, which gives full backward compatibility to 10/100/1000 Mbps networks. As network backbones are moving from 1Gbps to 10Gbps, Cat 7 is going to be used rapidly, because it's the only cabling standard in copper that supports such high-speed data transfers. The other option for 10G is fiber. But if you're planning to deploy fiber then the biggest problem will be the loss of backward compatibility. And you have to build a new cabling infrastructure for your organization. But there is one limitation in Cat 7 over Fiber. With Fiber you can connect two end-points within a distance of 45 Km, but while using copper you can go only upto 100 mtrs. So, if you are planning to build a MAN, then there is no option other than going for fiber; but if you are talking about connecting LAN devices, then Cat7 would be the best possible option.

Managed structured cabling
This is another key trend in structured cabling today. As data centers become more complex with more equipment coming in, you need something like this to manage the connectivity. It is a real-time Layer-1 management system for networks. Such an intelligent system consists of an end-to-end structured cabling system with intelligent patch panels and software agents that provide a complete view of physical layer connectivity and connect it to logical layers. It collects real-time information used to automatically maintain database connectivity, and is capable of presenting data in a compressed format, enabling administrators to troubleshoot and document the network efficiently. You can for example, immediately trace broken links and rectify them. Being real time, the system allows admins to resolve all issues quickly. When this is coupled with today's manageable switches the efficiency increases tremendously. As a result the admin will not only be able to find and manage SNMP enabled devices from a central location but also be able to check for data patterns running through the network. With the growth of multi-location office and large and multiple campus areas, the importance of properly managing network resources has become very important and Intelligent calling lets you do this.

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