Pros and Cons: Containerized Data Center

Posted on July 12, 2021January 19, 2023 by EES

Containerized data center is a concept that is one of its kind, innovative, beneficial, and equally challenging. The idea of making your data centers in a container was first introduced in 2007. And since then, numerous international companies have adopted this way of keeping their IT infrastructure well-organized, secure, and at easy access. With time, container data centers have become amazingly popular, and that has urged the providers to deliver a variety of cooling options, sizes, space, and layouts.

In simple words, we can explain containerization as a solution for the companies who lack experts and skilled staff to maintain the IT as it usually comes with ready-made plug and play units. It means no employees are required! It is a reasonable compensation to the brands lacking human labor.

Manufactured on standardized technology, containerized data centers need to be assembled by competent personnel. Well, most of the time, container data centers demand no extra hands for designing or assembly. It will keep your data maintained, organized, and flowing smoothly.

What is a Containerized Data Center?

But what is precisely “containerization” and “containerized data centers”?

Containerization is a practice where the technology experts use modular blocks to make a whole IT setup inside and bring every required equipment to work in a data center effortlessly. Built inside the modular boxes, the containerized data center is exclusively designed and organized to provide a perfect mix of generators, networking equipment, cooling equipment, servers, uninterruptible power supplies, and storage devices.

You can call them pods as they look like one. As per the provider you have chosen, and considering the need of the business, containerization can be used for both permanent and temporary deployments. Its best use is in disaster areas or construction sites. In simple words, these are the “shipping containers”. The most usual way of cooling is water for containers.

What is more?

Well, it is a place where companies have been saving extra data because it provides an entire digital setup offering additional servers. Especially for those who are not planning to move to the cloud can use containerized data centers as a source of storage.

Pros of Choosing a Containerized Data Center?

Free Up Space

Shifting your complete IT setup to a container will leave you with more than enough space inside your building as you will not need tons of room for building a data center. You will be free to use your available valuable square footage for making more offices.

Easy to Deploy

Apart from giving extra space, it offers easy maintenance. First, containerized data centers are generally made weather-resistant, so no need to worry about its damage. You can place them anywhere outside your company premises and even in underused spaces.

And, secondly, containers take less space although they are massive in size. How? Because you can easily stack them, and they won’t topple over. And, yes, they offer easy entry to all the containers separately through access doors that can be found on either side.

Faster Scalability

We all know how essential scalability is for running your company smoothly! And containerized data centers bring easy scalability right at your door.

Need to set up more equipment? Need more storage space? Not a big deal! All you have to do is ADD SOME MORE CONTAINERS AND STACK THEM UP! It let you meet the all-time changing demands of the organization rapidly and effortlessly.

Made Energy Efficient

The most highlighted advantage is its energy-saving feature. They are made energy-efficient, so you can save the cost regarding ongoing operational expenses. Its unique modular design comes with all integrated power systems and cooling equipment that also plays an essential role in minimizing the infrastructure expenditures and installation timeframes.

Few More Important Benefits Include

Containerized data centers can give significant cost savings.
Being a temporary stage, you can try implementing new IT strategies to check whether they will be aligned with your company or not.
They are portable, so you can set them up anywhere anytime. Whenever you feel the need to move, be free to transfer them anytime.
Containerized data centers are generally made soundproof, too.

Cons of Choosing a Containerized Data Center?

Although it maintains the whole IT infrastructure, it still lacks the same efficiency as an actual data center.
Container data centers do not offer numerous built-in redundancies in place.
No doubt, containerized data centers let you have an advanced modular approach for growing your company’s IT infrastructure, cautious planning and strategies are still compulsory to guard your technology investment.
To set and assemble them first, you need to have a team of specialists who can help and advise you to run them.
A single point of failure can shut down an entire container data center.
Finding the right location can sometimes be challenging as they tend to work on different cooling systems. The possible options are air and water. Consequently, the favored cooling system will disturb the planning, affect the place, and locate the data center.

Colocation Data Center Guide – Overview, Merits And Demerits

Posted on July 12, 2021January 19, 2023 by EES

The colocation data center has been trending, and it is no surprise. After all, it has a variety of benefits to give. Remember, everything that has advantages also comes with disadvantages, and so does the colocation data center. Being a helpful addition, it has been chosen by multiple businesses to make their operations flow smoothly and efficiently.

What is a Colocation Data Center?

Understanding colocation can be tricky because it doesn’t have one but several definitions. But in the simplest way, the colocation data center is defined as a process when any company locates all of its physical servers to another place under the safeguard of a 3rd party data center. And now, taking care of the servers and managing their daily tasks will only be the facility’s duty (3rd party). It is somewhat like renting a place, a warehouse, to keep the servers instead of buying one of your own. The company will be allowed to store parts of its IT infrastructure.

An easy way to keep your servers, routers, and all networking equipment secure and at easy access. It basically includes the upkeep of the servers, such as:

Checking the basic power delivery and ventilation system
Maintaining its cooling and heating equipment
Looking after connectivity issues
Supplying strong backup power in case of a power blackout
Ensuring all aspects of cybersecurity as well as physical security

As the customer (company) will have the ownership, they will have the authority to edit, modify, delete or change the data. The colocation facility will have no role in data handling, but it is responsible for protecting its stored data.

Types of Colocation Facilities

Retail Colocation

To lease a particular space, such as renting a rack or caged off corner present within a data center

Wholesale Colocation

Renting an entirely built data center at a cheaper rate with lesser power

Hybrid Cloud-Based Colocation

Mixed services of in-house and outsourced data centers

Benefits of a Colocation Data Center

One of the most obvious benefits is its ability to cut down the expenses on a significant level. Building and maintaining your own data center for keeping IT infrastructure safe will definitely cost more than the money you will be spending for a colocation data center. It is a cost-effective option.

To maintain the data center, you need a huge team of skilled experts to keep a close check on all equipment, security, power, and technical operations. Still, the colocation data center can minimize the number of technical staff. No need to hire large IT staff now!

What do you want to make your company a success? Reliability in every aspect of the action. And colocation data centers can deliver outstanding reliability as they are generally equipped with the highest provisions for redundancy.

The colocation data center offers security more than you can imagine, and it happened to be unbreachable, too. Besides, in case of any mishap, it ensures to provide a powerful backup. That means it has first-rate physical security securing multiple network connections.

The feature of feasible and quick Scalability makes it a good option. The flexibility lets you have an additional capacity in terms of space, power, and network bandwidth whenever needed, significantly when your business is expanding.

Along with getting a place to secure your complete IT infrastructure, you will be provided with experienced authorities. This team will solely be dedicated to looking out for your data center management.

Having a data center away from your premises will give you more space to make offices. You can use this extra space for any other purpose that could help you keep your business.

Disadvantages of Colocation Data Center

Starting your colocation data center can be really expensive as its initial cost can be high, but it usually depends on the services you have chosen and the number of technical specifications it is offering. Colocation Hosting is comparatively pricier than basic hosting.

To visit the data center, you need to travel that will cost money and can get time-consuming. Sometimes, the fluctuating monthly expenses because of the network bandwidth can decrease the efficiency of managing budget. Having a data center, not within your premises can be challenging. Your servers will be situated off-site, and accessing them on time can be an arduous task.

Accessing and visiting your center anytime will be a problem. Having a data center submitted to a 3rd party will demand you to make an appointment first to visit your IT infrastructure. Time restrictions might make contact for upkeep less appropriate.

What Is The Difference Between A Data Center And Cloud Computing?

Posted on June 22, 2021January 19, 2023 by EES

What can be the essential part while running the business? Undoubtedly, to keep the data safe, secure, and accessible. No matter the business type, real-time accessibility to the data is essential. But the actual question is: what option will be more secure? Where will your data stay safe? And how can you make access to the data feasible? Well, the search will end in two options: cloud and data center.

Cloud vs. Datacenter is one of the most debated topics in businesses. The most significant difference is their location of data storage. Where a Datacenter tends to keep your IT infrastructure maintained and saves your data on the premises, the cloud is designed for saving data off-premises that is only accessible through and internet but from anywhere and anytime, unlike the data center that offers accessibility only when the person is available on-site.

Introduction to Data Center

Simply explained as an “in-house data storage setup” supervised by the skilled team of IT experts, the data center is an on-premises server that is made to collect and save every inch of data in its hardware. The centers are made safer through physical and virtual strengthening such as firewalls and bullet-proof glass.

Introduction to Cloud Computing

First thing, Cloud computing is not a physical setting. Consider it non-existent support to help you keep the business information flow effortlessly. From a cloud technology, it runs on the internet and is a data storage service available virtually to all online users. No need for any hardware, IT experts, or infrastructure!

Cloud computing lets you accomplish high-end tasks and let you save data from outside damage also with easy backup.

What is the Difference Between a Data Center and Cloud Computing?

Among all the factors, the three most essential ones are explained here. Cloud vs. Data center is a crucial topic to be discussed. Keep reading the blog to know about the vital differences.

Customizable vs. Scalable

The most evident difference between these two is their ability to get customized or scaled up!

Having a data center means you are welcome to customize and bring the desired changes to the stored data and the available hardware. There is no involvement of a third party letting you have complete control over hardware infrastructure. To enhance the capacity as data centers are known to be limited or bring the anticipated changes, you must purchase and install more equipment replacing old technology. That is not the case with a cloud data system!

First, the cloud comes with a potentially limitless capacity. But depending on the use, you can scale up or scale down the features BUT cannot customize. Why? Because the third party is involved, that is the service providers. They own and manage the data center system and allow you to save the data only.

High-level Security

Genuinely speaking, both are safe and secure, but comparatively, the cloud will be safer!

Being physically present, the data center can be damaged by terrorist attacks, natural calamities (earthquakes, floods), and hackers. In fact, people of the company who don’t have the approved credentials can also access data sometimes that can be highly risky. It comes with broader access points making numerous vulnerabilities.

Talking about the cloud, it is not present on-premises means no one without access can enter, or he/she will be detected. No floods or earthquakes can damage your data. The problem of having untalented IT teams can be finished as you will be entrusting your data to a 3rd part, that ensures to provide the latest security certifications.

Costs

It goes without saying, but a data center is definitely an expensive option. The difference, as well as the reason for choosing the cloud, is its cost-effectiveness.

Building a data center, installing all the hardware, and strategizing the high-grade security need millions. And yes, the time, too. How can you forget to add the system’s maintenance cost? It means, operating a data center can cost a company somewhere between $10 million to $25 annually.

Setting a cloud service can be far more budget-friendly. It doesn’t demand time or effort to install the programs, extra money, or maintenance costs for running the systems. As soon as you register and pay the money, you are all set! Besides, you will be paying for the service you use in cloud computing and when you use it. No using a specific feature? Scale it down and save the money!

Other factors to Consider

Data centers have limited capacity depending on the space available for installing hardware, but cloud computing capacity is unlimited and can be scaled up with a simple subscription.
In data centers, the performance and reliability depend only on the team and business members, but in cloud service, the Cloud service provider is responsible.
Datacenter allows accessibility only when you are on the premises. Cloud computing lets you access and makes the necessary changes to the data anytime, no matter what part of the world you are in.
Where Cloud computing is fault-tolerant, data Centers are not.
For data centers, you must have a big team of IT professionals, but cloud computing needs no team as it is the responsibility of the service provider to look after the technicalities.
Cloud services can be availed at small investments, but for a data center, you need a huge investment.

Important Datacenter Network Topology Types Leading Business in 2022

Posted on June 4, 2021January 20, 2023 by EES

What is Data Center Network topology?

A Datacenter network topology is the combination of Data Center resources including computing power, storage, and networks that make up your data communication network. Datacenter networks are one way you can easily connect to thousands of servers, to manage the demands of your cloud computing network.

Before we get into it, let’s keep in mind what a datacenter is…

What is a Data Center?

A data center is a place or building set aside to manage the storage of computing systems and associated or interconnected components and devices; such as telecommunication devices, routers, and servers, and storage systems. All data on the internet gets stored on a server and remains accessible round the clock.

Types of Data Centers

The Data centers may differ in size; it can be one small server room or a group of servers in a larger warehouse.

The data center provides storage space to maintain various computing infrastructures and to connect with the cloud computing infrastructure. Remember that maintaining a datacenter consumes lots of energy. But it allows you to store your data and access it 24/7.

Note these four types of data centers:

Enterprise Data Centers

These types get built for a special purpose that makes them very useful in internal purposes of a single organization.

Colocation Data Centers

A co-location datacenter is a management space, within a larger data center, you rent for personal or business use and is in a remote location. The rental space provides the various resources of the data center that are available for the people.

Managed Service Data Centers

Management of this data center gets carried out by a third-party services provider and it offers different aspects of data storage, computing, and many other data management and computing services.

Cloud Data Centers

The cloud data center offers various types of services with the help of the third-party services provider and data and applications get hosted in cloud service platforms such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platform.

What is Network Topology?

A Datacenter Network Topology is simply the channels used to connect various nodes, servers, and computing devices to create physical and wireless network connections. It is the communication methods of the devices and telecommunication networks between various computing devices.

Types of Data Center Network Topology

There are multiple data center network topology types available;

Three-tier Data Center Topology

The Three-tier data center network topology uses the multi-rooted tree-based network topology, which involves the combination of three layers namely; access aggregate layer, core layers, and network switches.

Aggregate layer switches get interconnected to various access layer switches. And the core layer is used to create a connection for the data center to the Internet.

It’s efficient for enterprise-level network devices and it is very costly and power-consuming.

Fat tree Data Center Network

The Fat tree data center network is used to solve a basic problem with the three-tier data center network architecture. It uses the network switches-based architecture by using the Clos topology.

The fat-tree network topology also operates network switches to access the various layers, like aggregate and core layers. It uses more network switches rather than the three-tier data center network.

DCell

The DCell is a hybrid Datacenter Network. Here, one server gets connected directly to the other different servers within the same data center. The server in the DCell Network topology uses multiple Network interface cards.

This topology use servers and switches connected within the cell.

Core Components of a Datacenter Network Topology

The core components of the data center:

Routers
Switches
Firewalls
Storage
Servers.
Network infrastructure
Computing resources

Conclusion

In this article, we have covered the important data center network topology types and the concept of the data center. I hope you have found this article helpful. Don’t forget to leave a comment below.

Energy Efficiency in Data Center Networking: 8 Helpful Solutions

Posted on May 23, 2021January 24, 2023 by EES

Data Center Networking and Energy Efficiency

High energy consumption by data centers has raised many concerns about energy efficiency in data center networking. More especially with the increase of internet usage, video streaming, use of artificial intelligence, and machine learning.

Carbon emissions have also increased. So, saving energy in data centers has become very crucial to reduce the carbon footprint of data centers across the globe.

This article highlights the best ways to optimize energy efficiency in data center networking practices, and helpful ways to reduce energy consumption and CO2 emission in data centers and server rooms.

Ways to The Increase Energy Efficiency in Data Center Networking

Thankfully, there are some ways that can save our world from CO2 emissions and help reduce energy consumption in a datacenter network. The points below briefly discuss those ways:

Use of Server Virtualization to Reduce Energy Efficiency

Until the last few years, the average data center was using several physical servers for different applications including Oracle, SQL, Applications, Email, File, Print, etc. Now, server virtualization technology allows data centers to virtualize a single physical server into several computable machines with the help of software implementation.

Using one physical machine for many applications or workloads. This technology significantly decreases power consumption by cutting down the number of physical servers required for specific operations.

Decommissioning Unused Servers

After implementing virtualization technology, a lot of servers may remain idle. Decommissioning these unused servers will significantly increase energy efficiency in your data center network.

But first, identification of unused servers needs to be done, prior to being decommissioned. Use DCIM (Data Center Infrastructure Management) to see which machines are having low CPU utilization, and decommissioning those will help increase the energy efficiency of the data center.

Consolidating Servers

Consolidating lightly used servers and combining all the applications onto one server significantly reduces energy consumption over the long term. When you use a single server for a single workload, 90% of the servers in a data center run at 10% utilization only.

So, consolidating your many tasks into a single server will help turn off the remaining servers and increase the energy efficiency of the data center.

Effectively Managing Data Storage Space

Data storage devices take up a lot of space and energy in a data center. Managing them properly can help increase efficiency.

Use features like data compression, keeping a single copy of multiple duplicate files, use of snapshots, use of high-level RAIDs with lesser discs, storing old data to low-performance drives.

You can also use lower-speed drives, using MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks), and using solid-state drives over hard disks can significantly reduce energy consumption.

Using More Energy-Efficient Machines

Day by day, many electronic devices are becoming more energy-efficient. So is the case of server equipment such as machines, storage drives, UPSs, PDUs.

Replacing old machines with modern energy-efficient machines on a large scale will cut energy consumption to a great extent. And save costs over the long run.

Using Hot Aisle/Cold Aisle Layout

The servers consume cold air via the front and exhaust hot air via the backside of the servers. This makes physical cooling of the data center a top cost.

The hot aisle/cold aisle solution proposes to reduce energy consumption and management costs involved in server temperature management. Hot aisle/cold aisle refers to a data center layout design that manages air-flow, lowering the energy, cooling, and management cost of data centers.

Using Variable Speed Fan Drives

A simple 10% reduction of your server fan’s speed can also cut your energy consumption by approx. 25%. Using variable speed fan drives to replace the constant speed fans will help increase energy efficiency within your data center network.

Using Outside Air Instead Of HVAC

Using air from the environment to ventilate the data center, especially during winter or nighttime, instead of HVAC reduces the cooling cost up to 60% and more. Installing a cooling system will help compress and cool down the air within your data center. Although, running cooling compressors 24/7 is energy-consuming.

Hence, using environmental ventilation during winter and nighttime will help reduce energy cost significantly.

Visual Data Modeling in Datacenter Networking: Important Features You Must Know In 2022

Posted on May 21, 2021January 24, 2023 by EES

Datacenter Networking and Visual Data Modeling

Visual data modeling usually helps administrators enhance network monitoring efficiency by providing the information needed for the determination in real-time and even identifies whether or not the network is running optimally. Administrators can effectively identify the deficiencies and the network efficiently with the help of tools like networking software.

What is Visual Data Modeling?

Visual data modeling, or visual modeling, is a graphical representation of data that you have analyzed. You can either convert all your data into a visual presentation or use parts of it to make a visual model.

The process of visual data modeling is quite complex at first glance, but it becomes straightforward once you get a grip.

Why is it used? Continue reading..,

What is The Role of Visual Data Modeling in Data Center?

Visual Data Modeling conveys only the necessities of a system from a separate view and hiding all the unessential details. It works on a higher level of abstraction, which helps beginners to build visually advanced mobile applications and websites. It also helps to understand complex systems easily and search, differentiate design choices at a low cost.

Benefits of Visual Data Modeling

There are many advantages of Visual Modeling in datacenter networking:

Transparent Perception of Your Data Network

By simply improving transparency in your network monitoring process, you, especially if you’re the administrator, can easily have a clear visualized picture of all the connected devices in the network; go through how the data is revolving among them, and then identify and rectify the issues that may interrupt smooth performance and lead to a failure.

Quick Identification of Security Threats

The primary aim of network monitoring is to help the organization understand the normal performance of the network. When some unusual activities occur, like an incomprehensible growth in the network traffic level, it becomes easy for the administrators to identify the issue and regulate it whether it is a security threat.

Better Use of IT Resources

The usage of hardware and software tools in the network monitoring system reduces the work of the IT teams. This leaves them with enough time to attend to the critical projects of your organization.

Building Flexible-Timeless Infrastructure

The network monitoring system usually provides reports on performing all network components over a specific period.

Network Monitoring software tracks the overall performance of a computer network. The solutions provided are used to detect the problems faced in a network by analyzing the live performance against an expected performance baseline. There are some tools available that help the IT staff have access to the center diagram of intelligent data, which is an important component in the IT department.

ManageEngine OpManager

The ManageEngine Op manager is a solution for network management that comprises both network and server monitoring, plus analysis of network capacity, and management of configuration and faults.

The OpManager allows the user to observe the availability, traffic, packet loss, performance metrics, and time of responding to different devices like servers, routers, switches, and virtual machines. The OpManager has several visualization tools that help the employees in network monitoring.

Visual Data Modeling of the Datacenter

The management of data center infrastructure becomes difficult if one does not visualize the components present in it. It’s very important to have a plain knowledge of every aspect. Then, you can easily determine the performance at the rack and floor levels of the data center with the help of different data center visual data modeling tools.

3D Datacenter Floor

There are many features of OpManger’s data center networking tools, and datacenter visual data modeling is one of the most prominent. It enhances your capacity to create a 3D blueprint of the data center, with the racks. The 3D view is dynamic, and it shows the health status of devices in each rack.

Rack Builder

The network visualization capabilities of the OpManger enable creating virtual racks with the devices that are populated on it. The rack shows the live health status of the devices that are scaled on it. The faults or issues in the performance are being highlighted with the help of color codes.

By clicking on the faulty devices, it will drill it down to the device’s snapshot page to analyze the device’s performance and then identify the fault. You can create a virtual rack simply by adding the devices to the OpManager. After this, the devices on the rack can get copied and pasted and the sizes changeable whenever required.

Let’s Sum It Up!!

These are the important aspects that you should know about visual data modeling. The entire process might seem tough, but the result will be helpful even in future projects. Proper visualization of your data analysis can significantly help with the project’s execution. It encourages organization in the order of running your project and documenting everything.

Last, visual data modeling even helps you track mistakes with precision. It even helps you to adjust the changing requirements and erase the mistakes without affecting the entire project.

7 Important Datacenter Networking Challenges You Would Loved to Know in 2022

Posted on May 17, 2021January 24, 2023 by EES

Challenges in Datacenter Networking

Data Centre networking is the incorporation of computing services including switches, routers, load balancing, and analytics software to enable the collection and distribution of data.

Modern data center networking challenges present an expensive impact that may extend across the connected variety of data resources, including virtual machines, containers, and bare-metal applications. This may negatively affect the unified monitoring and granular security controls.

Top Datacenter Networking Challenges

Some challenges in data center networking include:

Data Security

One consistent source of datacenter networking challenges is security. A data breach could cost millions of dollars in lost intellectual property, private data leakage, and stolen personal information. Target, for example, lost $162 million because of a data breach. All data center administrators must consider risk management and protect both stored and distributed data across the network. Indeed, according to a survey conducted by the Information Management Society, 32 percent of CIOs ranked security as their top concern.

Power Management

While server consolidation and virtualization reduce the amount of hardware in the data center, they do not always lower energy consumption. Despite being significantly more efficient, blade servers consume four to five times the energy of previous data storage technologies.

Power and cooling requirements are becoming more important as equipment requirements change.

Capacity Planning

Maintaining optimum performance requires operating the data center at maximum capacity. Still, IT managers often leave a margin for error, a capacity protection gap, to ensure that activities do not suffer interruptions. Over-provisioning is costly and a waste of computing space, computer processing power, and electricity.

Datacenter administrators are becoming more worried about running out of space, which is why a growing number of datacenters are implementing DCIM programs to detect idle processing, storage, and cooling capacity.

DCIM enables data centers to operate at maximum capacity while minimizing risk.

The Internet of Things (IoT)

The capability to control sensors remotely in almost every system is raising plenty of additional issues for data centers. The Internet of Things, according to Gartner, is a disruptive force that will transform the data center, owing to the sheer volume of data it will produce. The IoT data will have to get processed, prioritized, stored, and analyzed.

Still, since IoT data gets generated in bulk, new data center technologies like edge computing are necessary to keep the volume under control.

Read more on the tech making IoT networking relevant

Mobile Enterprise

Datacenter networking challenges consequently plague mobile computing service providers and their “personal device” strategies, just as they are by the security of these devices. Employees have immediate access to business-critical data through handheld devices, but these devices must remain controlled and protected.

To avoid the loss of confidential information with emerging datacenter networking challenges, data access must remain controlled and limited, whether workers use their own devices or the organization provides smartphones and tablets. Remotely wiping a mobile device’s memory or tracking and locking a missing or stolen device would require extra protection.

Simultaneously, additional questions about user privacy continue to emerge—for example, what are the long-term consequences of law enforcement having access to the data stored on any computer confiscated as part of an investigation? Mobile enterprise computing poses technological, organizational, and legal problems that the data center must resolve in the end.

Real-Time Reporting

The importance of real-time data analytics and reporting is growing. Not only are DCIM tools used to track physical data center activities, but big data analytics enables real-time monitoring of irregularities or problems that may show a security breach or other problem.

Real-time monitoring following analytics advances us closer to self-healing data centers capable of initiating a response, such as isolating a server or rerouting data traffic to a pre-defined alert.

Balancing Cost Controls with Efficiency

Budgeting and cost management are ongoing issues for every department, but the data center’s cost-control concerns are special. Whilst you want to ensure that your data centers are effective, creative, and elegant, you must also be mindful of cost control.

For example, greening the data center is a continuous goal. Promoting energy efficiency lowers operational costs while still promoting environmental responsibility, which is why IT managers control the efficacy of power use. Other methods, such as virtualization, improve operational performance while keeping costs in check.

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3 Data Center Networking Tips You Should Know

Posted on May 16, 2021January 24, 2023 by EES

Data center networking is a very complex arrangement of network devices including switches, interfaces, and networks, etc. that interconnects various nodes to form a large network is known as a data center. With having so many resources like network and storage, the data center also has a communication network.

Where DCN plays a significant role, it must have to be enough efficiency to control so many networks ( even 1000) at a single time because, in the ongoing days, the pretension of cloud computing is growing so high. But somehow interconnection network bounded it on these days.

Data Center Networking Types

There are so many types of data center networks, to know some of them to read the whole article carefully.

Three-Tier Data Center Network

This three-tier data center network has three layers: access, aggregate, and core layers. It is structured as tree-based. There is a direct connection between the edge layer switches and the lower layer. In short, every layer is with multiple layer switches through the server. There is also a connection between the data center and the internet through the core layer. But having all these things, this three-layer data center network can’t make it able to control the increasing demand for cloud computing.

One of the main problems for this issue is scalability. Also, this three-layer data center network needs a bluffy level of topology, which is too expensive and power-consuming. There are also so many significant problems for this issue like fault tolerance, oversubscription, cross-sectional bandwidth, and many more.

Fat Tree Data Center Network

One of the most critical issues of the three-tier data center network is oversubscription, which this fat-tree data center network can reduce. It also can minimize the cross-section problem. Its network also has three layers like a three-tier data center network like access, aggregate, and core layer. But it is entirely different from that three-tier data center network; it has much more network connection than a three-tier data center network.

It’s a different type of architecture where it is made of K pods. These K pods have so many types of servers like k/2 aggregate, switches, (k/2)2 server, and k/2 access layer. Here you can see a connection between core switches and aggregate switches. This fat tree DCN gives you a 1:1 oversubscription ratio, which is far better than three-tier DCN. But at last, there are also some problems in fat-tree DCN like scalability.

Dcell

This type of data center network is a little bit different from others. Here you can see the server is connected directly to another server. The Dcell server is decorated with many types of Network interface Cards. Here in this data center network, all higher-level cell has so many lower layer cells. A basic unit in this data center network is cell0, and it has one commodity network and n servers.

You can understand the calculation like this cell1 will contain k=n+1 cell0 cells. With all these things, this can be considered as high-quality structural robustness and scalability. But in the last, it also has some problems in terms of network latency, and another one is cross-section bandwidth.

Other Types of Data Center Network

Scaffidi, BCube, Jellyfish are some of the popular data center networks. Every data center network has its type of function.

What are the Challenges?

Among all of the data center networks, there is the main problem which is scalability. After the arrival of the cloud paradigm, DCNs need so many nodes, even up to 1000. With this problem, another one is cross-section bandwidth. In all of that DCNs, there is some problem if something is good in a DCN, then another thing is worst in that.

Interpretation About the Performance of Dcns

Till now, we have discussed three main types of DCNs. The fat-tree data center network has low latency than the other two data center networks named Dcell and a three-tier data center network, but where Dcell can solve scalability, it has the problem of cross-section bandwidth. So you can see that every data center network has various types of problems and the solution of another’s problem solution.

The Energy Efficiency of Data Center Networks

The importance of the energy requirements and environmental impacts is increasing day by day. For the present day, one of the significant problems for the ICT sector is the efficiency of energy. According to a report in 2010, around 15.6 billion kWh energy was used by the ICTs. It is expected to increase by 50% in the following years.