Colocation Data Center: Are Hyperscale Systems the Future? Essay

Typical data centers can occupy from one room to a complete building. Most equipment are server-like mounted in rack cabinets. Servers differ in size from single units to large independently standing storage units which are sometimes as big as the racks. Massive data centers even make use of shipping containers consisting of 1000’s of servers. Instead of repairing individual servers, the entire container is replaced during upgrades.

Cloud computing is a “newsworthy” term in the IT industry in recent times and it is here to stay! Cloud computing is not a technology, or even a set of technologies – it’s an idea. Cloud computing is not a standard defined by any standards organization. Basic understanding for Cloud: “Cloud” represents the Internet; Instead of using applications installed on your computer or saving data to your hard drive, you’re working and storing stuff on the Web. Data is kept on servers and used by the service you’re using; tasks are performed in your browser using an interface/ console provided by the service. A credit card and internet access is all you need to make an investment in

With the starting of Internet era, most of the people and majority companies in the world became dependent on the services you could get to with a click of the mouse. The best example may be the free email (Gmail/Yahoo mail), the chat technology (Yahoo Messenger), Social Networking websites (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter). One can’t imagine life without them. That’s where the cloud was born. You need cloud data centers to run that stuff.

In conventional datacenters, there were two networks. One used for local area network which was built on Ethernet, was used by users to access applications running on servers. And the second one often built on Fiber channel, which connects servers to the storage module where mountains of data are stored. Both networks require huge capital investment, each requiring specialized hardware. Both networks have vastly different management tools, which require staff with different skill sets to build, maintain and manage. With the proliferation of datacenter, equipment density and power consumption became more critical than ever. Thus the cost of maintenance and total cost of ownership began to increase.

Stratoscale is focused on leveraging technology to help IT teams, within the service provider, make better and more profitable usage of existing infrastructures. Service Provider data center requirements are growing at an ever-increasing pace. In response to this changing and challenging landscape, Stratoscale has built a hardware-agnostic hyper-converged software solution that facilitates scale-out, simplifies operations and allows your IT infrastructure to keep up with your, and your customers’, business growth.

Another advantage of the cloud is in physical infrastructure a tier-3 datacenter can provide. Some of the components of a tier-3 datacenter include secure physical housing, data redundancy, internet redundancy, power redundancy, a “Fort Knox” type of physical brick and mortar construction (Ramasamy,2011).

Second and the most important challenge faced by the companies are the amount of energy required to manage data centres. All the data centres around the world use around 30 billion watts of energy on average, which is equal to output by 30 nuclear power plants [6]. By 2020 it is expected that, US datacentres

Although both types of computing systems can store information, as a physical unit, only a data centre can store servers and other equipment. As such, cloud service providers use data centres to house cloud services and cloud-based resources. For cloud-hosting purposes, vendors also often own multiple data centres in several geographic locations to safeguard data availability during outages and other data centre failures.

Data centers are one of the world’s largest consumer of electricity, servers are running 24*7 tightly controlled conditions of environment and mostly not at full load. With the high growth rate of social networking, electronic banking, internet usage, paperless work and modern IT services such as cloud computing and virtualization, the requirements for resilient, safe and energy-efficient data centers are increasing.

Traditional data centers consist of a large number of physical machines, each executing a single instance of an operating system. For example, a certain group of servers supports email function and executes Linux with an appropriate set of programs for email handling. Another group of servers may run Windows providing access for remote users to office applications. Installing new application usually means purchasing a new physical server and installing a new instance of an operating system and the application. Capacity of the servers needs to be planned to handle peak loads of applications resulting in a relatively low utilization leading to wasteful power consumption and maintenance costs.

Business applications have dependably been excessively extravagant. They oblige a datacenter which offers which offers space, power, cooling, bandwidth, networks, entangled programming stack and servers and storage and a team of experts to install, configure and run them. We need development, staging, testing, production and failure environments and when another adaptation comes up, we need to upgrade and then the entire framework is down.

1.2: At present the data centers are a great matter of concern and there is a global understanding about the future of the data centers. Although data centers are developing at a very fast pace but still the efforts are going on to standardize the things and reduce the environmental effects of the data centers. Some of the big IT companies like Google, yahoo, IBM etc. have gone a far ahead to achieve green data centers. Some companies like HCL, IBM etc. are providing packages to help the organizations develop green data centers in a cost effective manner. The larger player of the IT industry are all well aware of the effects of the data centers on the environment and they are trying their best but still we need to increase the awareness into small

Conventional systems were too complex to operate and maintain. Many cables were required to connect all the components, and methods to accommodate and organize the data. A single mainframe required a great deal of power, and had to be cooled to avoid overheating. Security became important and computers were expensive. Data centers were then introduced where collectively data was stored and maintained. Data collection increased rapidly over years, which led to an increase in data centers. Communication between these servers became difficult and complex. For an efficient communication between the servers many architectures were proposed. Data center architectures and requirements can differ significantly.

Design resource management algorithms have been developed to run the data centers more effectively and efficiently this was due to the increasing energy costs in data centers.

With the increase in demand, high performance systems have to be increasing their level of performance, availability, accessibility, security and scalability for the business continuity.