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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