Data Center Infrastructure

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.