Over the last decade, developments in cloud computing and an increased demand for flexible IT solutions have led to new technologies that literally transform the traditional data center. Many businesses have moved from physical on-site data centers to virtualized data center solutions as server virtualization has become a common practice.

What Is Data Center Virtualization and How Does it Work?

Data center virtualization is the transfer of physical data centers into digital data centers using a cloud software platform, so that companies can remotely access information and applications.

In a virtualized data center, a virtual server, also called a software-defined data center (SDDC) is created from traditional, physical servers. This process abstracts physical hardware by imitating its processors, operating system, and other resources with help from a hypervisor. A hypervisor (or virtual machine monitor, VMM, virtualizer) is a software that creates and manages a virtual machine. It treats resources such as CPU, memory, and storage as a pool that can be easily reallocated between existing virtual machines or to new ones.

Benefits of Data Center Virtualization

Data center virtualization offers a range of strategic and technological benefits to businesses looking for increased profitability or greater scalability. Here we’ll discuss some of these benefits.

Scalability

Compared to physical servers, which require extensive and sometimes expensive sourcing and time management, virtual data centers are relatively simpler, quicker, and more economical to set up. Any company that experiences high levels of growth might want to consider implementing a virtualized data center.

It’s also a good fit for companies experiencing seasonal increases in business activity. During peak times, virtualized memory, processing power, and storage can be added at a lesser cost and in a faster timeframe than purchasing and installing components on a physical machine. Likewise, when demand slows, virtual resources can be scaled down to remove unnecessary expenses. All of these are not possible with metal servers.

Data Mobility

Before virtualization, everything from common tasks and daily interactions to in-depth analytics and data storage happened at the server level, meaning they could only be accessed from one location. With a strong enough Internet connection, virtualized resources can be accessed when and where they are needed. For example, employees can access data, applications, and services from remote locations, greatly improving productivity outside the office.

Moreover, with help of cloud-based applications such as video conferencing, word processing, and other content creation tools, virtualized servers make versatile collaboration possible and create more sharing opportunities.

Cost Savings

Typically outsourced to third-party providers, physical servers are always associated with high management and maintenance. But they will not be a problem in a virtual data center. Unlike their physical counterparts, virtual servers are often offered as pay-as-you-go subscriptions, meaning companies only pay for what they use. By contrast, whether physical servers are used or not, companies still have to shoulder the costs for their management and maintenance. As a plus, the additional functionality that virtualized data centers offer can reduce other business expenses like travel costs.

Cloud vs. Virtualization: How Are They Related?

It’s easy to confuse virtualization with cloud. However, they are quite different but also closely related. To put it simply, virtualization is a technology used to create multiple simulated environments or dedicated resources from a physical hardware system, while cloud is an environment where scalable resources are abstracted and shared across a network.

Clouds are usually created to enable cloud computing, a set of principles and approaches to deliver compute, network, and storage infrastructure resources, platforms, and applications to users on-demand across any network. Cloud computing allows different departments (through private cloud) or companies (through a public cloud) to access a single pool of automatically provisioned resources, while virtualization can make one resource act like many.

In most cases, virtualization and cloud work together to provide different types of services. Virtualized data center platforms can be managed from a central physical location (private cloud) or a remote third-party location (public cloud), or any combination of both (hybrid cloud). On-site virtualized servers are deployed, managed, and protected by private or in-house teams. Alternatively, third-party virtualized servers are operated in remote data centers by a service provider who offers cloud solutions to many different companies.

If you already have a virtual infrastructure, to create a cloud, you can pool virtual resources together, orchestrate them using management and automation software, and create a self-service portal for users.

Article Source: What Is Data Center Virtualization?

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Understanding Data Center Redundancy

As the need for data storage drives the growth of data centers, colocation facilities are increasingly important to enterprises. A colocation data center brings many advantages to an enterprise data center, such as carriers helping enterprises manage their IT infrastructure that reduces the cost for management. There are two types of hosting carriers: carrier-neutral and carrier-specific. In this article, we will discuss the differentiation of them.

Carrier Neutral and Carrier Specific Data Center: What Are They?

Accompanied by the accelerated growth of the Internet, the exponential growth of data has led to a surge in the number of data centers to meet the needs of companies of all sizes and market segments. Two types of carriers that offer managed services have emerged on the market.

Carrier-neutral data centers allow access and interconnection of multiple different carriers while the carriers can find solutions that meet the specific needs of an enterprise’s business. Carrier-specific data centers, however, are monolithic, supporting only one carrier that controls all access to corporate data. At present, most enterprises choose carrier-neutral data centers to support their business development and avoid some unplanned accidents.

There is an example, in 2021, about 1/3 of the cloud infrastructure in AWS was overwhelmed and down for 9 hours. This not only affected millions of websites, but also countless other devices running on AWS. A week later, AWS was down again for about an hour, bringing down the Playstation network, Zoom, and Salesforce, among others. The third downtime of AWS also impacted Internet giants such as Slack, Asana, Hulu, and Imgur to a certain extent. 3 outages of cloud infrastructure in one month took a beyond measure cost to AWS, which also proved the fragility of cloud dependence.

In the above example, we can know that the management of the data center by the enterprise will affect the business development due to some unplanned accidents, which is a huge loss for the enterprise. To lower the risks caused by using a single carrier, enterprises need to choose a carrier-neutral data center and adjust the system architecture to protect their data center.

Why Should Enterprises Choose Carrier Neutral Data Center?

Carrier-neutral data centers are data centers operated by third-party colocation providers, but these third parties are rarely involved in providing Internet access services. Hence, the existence of carrier-neutral data centers enhances the diversity of market competition and provides enterprises with more beneficial options.

Another colocation advantage of a carrier-neutral data center is the ability to change internet providers as needed, saving the labor cost of physically moving servers elsewhere. We have summarized several main advantages of a carrier-neutral data center as follows.

Redundancy

A carrier-neutral colocation data center is independent of the network operators and not owned by a single ISP. Out of this advantage, it offers enterprises multiple connectivity options, creating a fully redundant infrastructure. If one of the carriers loses power, the carrier-neutral data center can instantly switch servers to another online carrier. This ensures that the entire infrastructure is running and always online. On the network connection, a cross-connect is used to connect the ISP or telecom company directly to the customer’s sub-server to obtain bandwidth from the source. This can effectively avoid network switching to increase additional delay and ensure network performance.

Options and Flexibility

Flexibility is a key factor and advantage for carrier-neutral data center providers. For one thing, the carrier neutral model can increase or decrease the network transmission capacity through the operation of network transmission. And as the business continues to grow, enterprises need colocation data center providers that can provide scalability and flexibility. For another thing, carrier-neutral facilities can provide additional benefits to their customers, such as offering enterprise DR options, interconnect, and MSP services. Whether your business is large or small, a carrier-neutral data center provider may be the best choice for you.

Cost-effectiveness

First, colocation data center solutions can provide a high level of control and scalability, expanding opportunity to storage, which can support business growth and save some expenses. Additionally, it also lowers physical transport costs for enterprises. Second, with all operators in the market competing for the best price and maximum connectivity, a net neutral data center has a cost advantage over a single network facility. What’s more, since freedom of use to any carrier in a carrier-neutral data center, enterprises can choose the best cost-benefit ratio for their needs.

Reliability

Carrier-neutral data centers also boast reliability. One of the most important aspects of a data center is the ability to have 100% uptime. Carrier-neutral data center providers can provide users with ISP redundancy that a carrier-specific data center cannot. Having multiple ISPs at the same time gives better security for all clients. Even if one carrier fails, another carrier may keep the system running. At the same time, the data center service provider provides 24/7 security including all the details and uses advanced technology to ensure the security of login access at all access points to ensure that customer data is safe. Also, the multi-layered protection of the physical security cabinet ensures the safety of data transmission.

Summary

While many enterprises need to determine the best option for their company’s specific business needs, by comparing both carrier-neutral and carrier-specific, choosing a network carrier neutral data center service provider is a better option for today’s cloud-based business customers. Several advantages, such as maximizing total cost, lower network latency, and better network coverage, are of working with a carrier-neutral managed service provider. With no downtime and constant concerns about equipment performance, IT decision-makers for enterprise clients have more time to focus on the more valuable areas that drive continued business growth and success.

Article Source: Carrier Neutral vs. Carrier Specific: Which to Choose?

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What Is Data Center Storage?

On-Premises vs. Cloud Data Center, Which Is Right for Your Business?

Data center infrastructure refers to all the physical components in a data center environment. These physical components play a vital role in the day-to-day operations of a data center. Hence, data center management challenges are an urgent issue that IT departments need to pay attention to. On the one hand, it is to improve the energy efficiency of the data center; on the other hand, it is to know about the operating performance of the data center in real-time ensuring its good working condition and maintaining enterprise development.

Data Center Infrastructure Basics

The standard for data center infrastructure is divided into four tiers, each of which consists of different facilities. They mainly include cabling systems, power facilities, cooling facilities, network infrastructure, storage infrastructure, and computing resources.

There are roughly two types of infrastructure inside a data center: the core components and IT infrastructure. Network infrastructure, storage infrastructure, and computing resources belong to the former, while cooling equipment, power, redundancy, etc. belong to the latter.

Core Components

Network, storage, and computing systems are vital infrastructures for data centers to achieve sharing access to applications and data, providing data centers with shared access to applications and data. Also, they are the core components of data centers.

Network Infrastructure

Datacenter network infrastructure is a combination of network resources, consisting of switches, routers, load balancing, analytics, etc., to facilitate the storage and processing of applications and data. Modern data center networking architectures, through using full-stack networking and security virtualization platforms that support a rich set of data services, can achieve connecting everything from VMs, containers, and bare-metal applications, while enabling centralized management and fine-grained security controls.

Storage Infrastructure

Datacenter storage is a general term for the tools, technologies and processes for designing, implementing, managing and monitoring storage infrastructure and resources in data centers, mainly referring to the equipment and software technologies that implement data and application storage in data center facilities. These include hard drives, tape drives and other forms of internal and external storage and backup management software utilities external storage facilities/solutions.

Computing Resources

A data center meter is a memory and processing power to run applications, usually provided by high-end servers. In the edge computing model, the processing and memory used to run applications on servers may be virtualized, physical, distributed among containers or distributed among remote nodes.

IT Infrastructure

As data centers become critical to enterprise IT operations, it is equally important to keep them running efficiently. When designing data center infrastructure, it is necessary to evaluate its physical environment, including cabling system, power system, cooling system to ensure the security of the physical environment of the data center.

Cabling Systems

The integrated cabling is an important part of data center cable management, supporting the connection, intercommunication and operation of the entire data center network. The system is usually composed of copper cables, optical cables, connectors and wiring equipment. The application of the data center integrated wiring system has the characteristics of high density, high performance, high reliability, fast installation, modularization, future-oriented, and easy application.

Power Systems

Datacenter digital infrastructure requires electricity to operate. Even an interruption of a fraction of a second will result in a significant impact. Hence, power infrastructure is one of the most critical components of a data center. The data center power chain starts at the substation and ends up through building transformers, switches, uninterruptible power supplies, power distribution units, and remote power panels to racks and servers.

Cooling Systems

Data center servers generate a lot of heat while running. Based on this characteristic, cooling is critical to data center operations, aiming to keep systems online. The amount of power each rack can keep cool by itself places a limit on the amount of power a data center can consume. Generally, each rack can allow the data center to operate at an average 5-10 kW cooling density, but some may be higher.

Data Center Infrastructure Management Solutions

Due to the complexity of IT equipment in a data center, the availability, reliability, and maintenance of its components require more attention. Efficient data center operations can be achieved through balanced investments in facilities and accommodating equipment.

Energy Usage Monitoring Equipment

Traditional data centers lack the energy usage monitoring instruments and sensors required to comply with ASHRAE standards and collect measurement data for use in calculating data center PUE. It results in a poor monitoring environment for the power system of the data center. One measure is to install energy monitoring components and systems on power systems to measure data center energy efficiency. Enterprise teams can implement effective strategies by the measure to balance overall energy usage efficiency and effectively monitor the energy usage of all other nodes.

Cooling Facilities Optimization

Independent computer room air conditioning units used in traditional data centers often have separate controls and set points, resulting in excessive operation due to temperature and humidity adjustments. It’s a good way for helping servers to achieve cooling by creating hot-aisle/cold-aisle layouts to maximize the flow of cold air to the equipment intakes and the hot exhaust air from the equipment racks. The creation of hot or cold aisles can eliminate the mixing of hot and cold air by adding partitions or ceilings.

CRAC Efficiency Improvement

Packaged DX air conditioners likely compose the most common type of cooling equipment for smaller data centers. These units are often described as CRAC units. There are, however, there are several ways to improve the energy efficiency of the cooling system employing DX units. Indoor CRAC units are available with a few different heat rejection options.

• – As with rooftop units, adding evaporative spray can improve the efficiency of air-cooled CRAC units.
• – A pre-cooling water coil can be added to the CRAC unit upstream of the evaporator coil. When ambient conditions allow the condenser water to be cooled to the extent that it provides direct cooling benefits to the air entering the CRAC unit, the condenser water is diverted to the pre-cooling coil. This will reduce or sometimes eliminate the need for compressor-based cooling for the CRAC unit.

DCIM

Data center infrastructure management is the combination of IT and operations to manage and optimize the performance of data center infrastructure within an organization. DCIM tools help data center operators monitor, measure, and manage the utilization and energy consumption of data center-related equipment and facility infrastructure components, effectively improving the relationship between data center buildings and their systems.

DCIM enables bridging of information across organizational domains such as data center operations, facilities, and IT to maximize data center utilization. Data center operators create flexible and efficient operations by visualizing real-time temperature and humidity status, equipment status, power consumption, and air conditioning workloads in server rooms.

Preventive Maintenance

In addition to the above management and operation solutions for infrastructure, unplanned maintenance is also an aspect to consider. Unplanned maintenance typically costs 3-9 times more than planned maintenance, primarily due to overtime labor costs, collateral damage, emergency parts, and service calls. IT teams can create a recurring schedule to perform preventive maintenance on the data center. Regularly checking the infrastructure status and repairing and upgrading the required components promptly can keep the internal infrastructure running efficiently, as well as extend the lifespan and overall efficiency of the data center infrastructure.

Article Source: Data Center Infrastructure Basics and Management Solutions

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What Are Data Center Tiers?

Multi-access edge computing or MEC is a type of network architecture that provides an IT service environment and cloud computing capabilities at the network‘s edge. MEC achieves this by moving computing services and traffic away from a centralized data center and closer to the customer.

In other words, MEC is a use case of edge computing that seeks to provide highly efficient network operations and consistent service delivery while improving customer experience. Below, we’ve discussed more about multi-access edge computing: its characteristics, working principle, use cases, benefits, and everything in between.

MEC Characteristics

Multi-access edge computing has five key characteristics, these are:

Proximity – MEC deployments are often close to the source of information or data to be processed, reducing the need for back and forth transfer of data to core locations.

Real-time operations – use cases that require real-time data processing and decision-making benefit greatly from multi-access edge computing, thanks to accelerated connectivity.

Ultra-low latency – with a latency of under 20 milliseconds, MEC guarantees faster response and enhanced user experience.

Continuous operations – applications using MEC architecture are localized; hence they run independently even when disconnected from the core network.

Interoperability – multi-access edge computing allows apps and systems to communicate easily without the need of migrating or adopting them to a new environment.

Multi-Access Edge Computing Working Principle

At the heart of multi-access edge computing is improved network efficiency. To understand how MEC works in the real world, we will use an everyday example for illustration. Take, for instance, a system or network that uses facial recognition to give users access to certain rooms or offices within the business premises. Typically, an application will communicate with the core network, and the latter will be connected to a backend server that runs the image analysis service.

Every time an employee needs access to a restricted room, the system captures their face and sends a request to the backend server via the core network. The server performs image analysis and decides whether to allow or restrict access. Here the latency could be 50ms to 100ms.

Now, imagine that the business upgrades its security, and instead of a mere facial recognition feature, employees will need to display their faces and speak some password or command through a video recorder attached to every entrance. Latency would then become a challenge due to the resource-intensive nature of live video and audio recording.

Multi-access edge computing solves this problem by moving image analysis services from the backend servers and closer to the live video recording application on the core network. The end results are reduced latency, faster image processing, and near real-time response, allowing employees to access the restricted areas without delays.

For these reasons, multi-access edge computing is broadly defined as the new era of cloud computing that leverages cloud technologies, mobility, and edge computing to move apps closer to end-users and computing services closer to the data to be processed.

MEC and 5 G

MEC-enabled networks being time-sensitive, benefit a lot from the high-speed data transfer and processing offered by the 5G network. The latter offers speeds of up to 10 times that of 4G, while MEC reduces latency by moving compute power into the network and closer to the end-user. These two technologies come together to boost the performance of applications and allow huge amounts of data to be transferred and processed in real-time.

Some service providers now offer 5G MEC solutions that achieve high-end computing dynamic and intelligent connections, enabling new business models and accelerating edge service innovation. With the integration of MEC and 5G, these providers can also enhance network security, improving the quality of service to the end-users. The distributed networking capability is another benefit that allows for a greater capacity to handle several inter-connected devices within a remote environment.

MEC Use Cases

The rapid adoption of digital transformation and the explosion of connected devices has increased the need for an agile and scalable network infrastructure that delivers higher volumes of data in less time. Therefore, multi-access edge computing has become an ideal option for several industries that leverages it for various use cases. These include:

AR and VR deployments – for augmented and virtual reality applications to work optimally, there’s a need for fast response times and low latency. MEC offers these benefits, and for that reason, it has seen wide adoption among AR and VR companies looking to launch new products and services.

Industrial IoT – industries use multi-access edge computing to run various operations, from real-time monitoring of processes to predictive analysis. Some also deploy MEC-enabled devices to improve safety levels in the industrial environment with the help of real-time data recording and analysis tools.

Customer services – businesses in the commercial, industrial, and B2B sectors have begun using multi-access edge computing to boost customer service operations. The ability to access data and statistical analytics faster and in-real time can also help enhance unified communication and boost decision-making in and outside the business.

Benefits of MEC

Multi-access edge computing is attractive to different market players due to the set of benefits it offers in terms of network connectivity, reliability, scalability, security, and cost. These are the main advantages of multi-access edge computing.

Reduced latency – latency is the time it takes for data to move from one point of a network to another. Having several devices connected across different networks causes data transfer issues due to delays in releasing data packets. By bringing compute services closer to the network edge, MEC significantly reduces communication latency.

Greater reliability and security – multi-access edge computing can be reliable and secure if the technology is deployed correctly. Partnering with the right edge computing provider means access to sophisticated security solutions that would otherwise be unavailable with public cloud deployments. By distributing data across a network and sealing all the security loopholes, it’s possible to safeguard data from serious cyber threats such as DDoS attacks.

Scalability and savings – Multi-access edge computing is highly scalable, allowing businesses to expand or dial back on services without incurring high costs.

Get Started With MEC

In the highly interconnected business environment, organizations that adopt multi-access edge computing stand a chance to enhance their network capabilities while boosting customer experience.

Before deploying any edge computing solutions, always assess your current and future networking needs. You also want to work with an expert IT consultant to help you choose the best edge computing infrastructure that suits your unique business needs.

Article Source:What is Multi-Access Edge Computing? | FS Community

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Created by the Uptime Institute, data center tiers are an efficient way to describe the infrastructure components that are utilized at a specific data center. The classification is recognizable in the industry as the standard to follow for data center performance. Tier 1 is the simplest infrastructure, while Tier 4 is the most complex. This article focuses on explaining Tier 3 data centers. What is a Tier 3 data center? What are the benefits of choosing it?

Features of a Tier 3 Data Center

A Tier 3 data center is a concurrently maintainable facility with multiple distribution paths for power and cooling. Unlike Tier 1 and 2 data centers, a Tier 3 facility does not require a total shutdown during maintenance or equipment replacement.

A Tier 3 facility requires all the components present in a Tier 2 data center, but these facilities must also have N+1 redundancy:

• “N” refers to the necessary capacity to support the full IT load.
• “+1” stands for an extra component for backup purposes.

N+1 redundancy ensures an additional component starts operating if the primary element runs into a failure or the staff removes the part for planned maintenance.

Tier 3 data centers also require a backup solution that can keep operations running in case of a local or region-wide power outage. The facility must ensure equipment can continue to operate for at least 72 hours following an outage.

Tier 3 data centers have a significant jump in availability when compared to lower ratings. Customers that rely on a tier 3 data center experience an expected uptime of 99.982% (1.6 hours of downtime annually).

Benefits of Choosing a Tier 3 Data Center

No disruption to equipment

If a company is experiencing frequent interruptions and increasing downtime, they might desire to upgrade to a more fault-tolerant system. Compared to Tier 1 and 2 facilities, Tier 3 data centers are ranked high in data center reliability as concurrent maintenance is built into the site’s topology. This inherently limits the effects of the disruption before it reaches IT operations. For mission critical applications and systems, this increase in reliability can become paramount and effective to necessitate an upgrade from Tier 2 to Tier 3.

No shutdown during maintenance or replacement

Tier 3 data centers have N+1 redundancy, which means an additional component starts working if the primary element runs into a failure or is removed by staff for planned maintenance. Multiple power circulation paths and capacity equipment are supplied with simultaneous energy. Unlike Tier 1 and Tier 2, these facilities require no shutdown when maintenance or replacement is needed, so IT operations will not be impacted.

Affordable than Tier 4 data centers

A Tier 4 data center is an expensive option for businesses. It has all the requirements of Tiers 1, 2 & 3 and ensures that all equipment is fully fault-resistant. Tier 4 data centers serve corporations and are packed with features such as 99.995% uptime (26.3 minutes downtime annually) and 2N+1 fully redundant infrastructure. While Tier 1 and 2 data centers might not be up to standards and cannot support complex features required by businesses due to their simpler infrastructure. In this sense, Tier 3 data centers might come as an optimal choice as they are more affordable than Tier 4 data centers and still offer impressive features.

Typically, Tier 3 data centers are the ideal choice for large companies with complex IT requirements that need extra fail-safes. Businesses that host critical and extensive databases, especially customer data, usually go for this tier. We hope this article can help you learn more about Tier 3 data centers and choose the best-suited tier for your business.

Article Source:Tier 3 Data Center: What Is It and Why Choose It? | FS Community

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