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.

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.

Tag: Data Center Networking