Designing for the new data center

Four experts contrast new data center approaches against traditional methods for solving tough business problems.

Sure, the new data center is all about geographically dispersed resources pooled to work as a single entity. But how would a new data center network design differ from a traditional approach to today's thorniest business problems? That's the challenge we gave to four systems integrators who specialize in new data center technologies.

While the businesses we described were fictitious, the integrators' solutions had to be based on actual work they've done for users. As it turns out, all the designers now look at a company's infrastructure as a virtualized entity built on logical components - not as a series of hardware, software and services. That perspective makes them see a server as a processing peripheral, an application as modular bits of code that can be executed on far-flung servers or an instant message as a piece of intellectual property. That new view becomes the basis for creative next-generation solutions.

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Web site reliability Electronic messaging growth Controlling server sprawl Sluggish applications

Sure, the new data center is all about geographically dispersed resources pooled to work as a single entity. But how would a new data center network design differ from a traditional approach to today's thorniest business problems? That's the challenge we gave to four systems integrators who specialize in new data center technologies.

While the businesses we described were fictitious, the integrators' solutions had to be based on actual work they've done for users. As it turns out, all the designers now look at a company's infrastructure as a virtualized entity built on logical components - not as a series of hardware, software and services. That perspective makes them see a server as a processing peripheral, an application as modular bits of code that can be executed on far-flung servers or an instant message as a piece of intellectual property. That new view becomes the basis for creative next-generation solutions.

ILM: When a Web site can't afford to go down

Lee Abrahamson, practice director of SAN solutions and advanced technology, CNT

Business problem: A shipping company relies heavily on its e-commerce site - so much so that it loses money every second the site is down. A disaster that takes the site down for hours to days would mean thousands - potentially millions - of dollars in lost revenue and perhaps permanent customer attrition.

Traditional approach: Create recovery points in 15-minute intervals on inexpensive but reliable tape and store copies with an off-site disaster-recovery vendor. If a disaster occurs, contact the off-site vendor. However, if this off-site vendor supports too many businesses affected, it might need days to restore systems. Some disaster-recovery sites can handle only a small percentage of their customers simultaneously.

Tape also might prove to be a bottleneck. A busy e-commerce database easily could fill 100 or more "tape mounts" in a 24-hour period (meaning the number of tapes used to back up a daily base copy of the entire database plus bundles of transactions in 15-minute intervals). Restoring many tapes would take hours, perhaps even days. Plus, for tapes stored off-site, the company also must factor in the time - likely another day - to locate and ship the tapes.

New data center approach: Use information life-cycle management (ILM) to put data on the most cost-effective media that also has the performance attributes needed to complete the storage job. Use expensive disk, mid-priced disk, less-expensive disk and tape.

One way to executive ILM is storage virtualization, which inserts storage intelligence between the host and its storage. Most virtualization engines reside "in-band" on the storage network and decouple the storage management functions (mirroring and snapshots) from the storage itself. This lets users build heterogeneous storage environments (multiple tiers and vendors). Such virtualization engines may be appliances but, eventually, they simply will be embedded in a storage network node (like a core switch).