Power of Networking
In this day and age, mission critical applications are accessed over wired or wireless networks. People are buying and selling cars and homes, looking for life partners, and virtually communicating with doctors; banks are offering electronic vault to store documents; VoIP and video solutions are providing free and effective communication with others, and just about everything else is happening on the internet.
We have the technology where the surgeon about to perform an operation is on a different continent than the patient, in a room full of computers linking him to the robot in the operating room. But now envision a network outage. The surgeon cannot continue the operation, people become stuck in elevators due to no electricity, underground trains stop, etc.
We have grown to expect almost instant response from a network when we submit a request to buy and sell stocks, make airline or hotel reservations, or perform any other transactions on the web. We have grown accustomed to the real-time world without understanding the challenges network engineers face in the back end.
With the ultimate goal of eliminating downtime and sharing data across regions, enterprises are deploying geographically dispersed data centers to minimize downtime, planned or unplanned. As data centers grow in size and complexity, enterprises are also adopting server virtualization technologies, including high availability clustering, NIC teaming, and VMware VMotion to achieve increased efficiency by distributing workloads between computers, sharing network resources effectively, and increasing the availability of applications. In addition to providing resource optimization, virtualization strategies offer data protection, which enables enterprises to build disaster recovery solutions and provide scalability, flexibility, high availability, and business continuity.
Next week, I will get into the details of data center design and the challenges posed by these virtualization technologies deployed in geographically dispersed data centers.
