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By Bill Gerneglia
To learn more about the future of the data center please visit.
What will the data center of the near future look like? How can the proper data center architecture and service offering help your organization leverage the benefits of a cloud ready data center?
How can the next generation data center help to increase your departments IT efficiencies, achieve economies of scale, improve agility, and accelerate secure delivery of IT services all while driving down your overall operating costs?
The answer to these questions comes when we look at vendor offerings which present the most comprehensive range of integrated services.
Visonary CIOs know that businesses rely on their data centers to support critical business operations and drive greater efficiency and value. As such, the data center is a key component that needs to be planned and managed carefully to meet the growing performance demands of users and applications.
According to Juniper, their data center architecture and cloud solution is a framework that allows architects to optimize data centers by:
• Scaling up and out without compromising performance or adding complexity
• Maintaining high availability
• Minimizing latency
• Maximizing capacity and throughput
• dynamically providing protection against evolving threats
• Supporting diverse application flows (multiple services, directions, and controls)
• Minimizing energy consumption
• Incorporating standards
• Maintaining an open architecture for adding value
Data Center service companies should offer a comprehensive data center network solution that combines best-in-class products with well-defined practices to build high-performance, robust, virtualized and costeffective data center networks.
This architecture should propose practices, technologies and products that help data center architects and engineers who are responsible for answering the requirements of designing modern data center networks that support business goals.
Emerging Data Center Trends
Evolving Business Application Architectures
Today’s enterprises rely on their business applications. These business applications enable transactions for internal employees, collaboration with outside partners and customers and capabilities that improve the business’ competitive advantage.
In today’s globally competitive world, applications must be available everywhere and at all times. When business applications perform on an “as needed” basis, the organization thrives; when they do not, business is lost.
Server Virtualization
The latest computing trends are clear: powerful servers, more open application designs, and the need to accomplish “more with less” in the data center place increasing pressures on IT budgets. The adoption rate of server virtualization in the infrastructure continues to increase. This produces a need to network the individual virtual machines with an additional layer of “virtual switching” within each server. Because multiple logical hosts now run on an individual server, it becomes necessary to differentiate their identities within the network and allow them to operate properly within their own logical domains. This trend creates the need to relate the virtual and physical network configurations, and it creates an interest in the ability to move application workloads in a flexible and seamless fashion.
Protecting Against Security Threats
Security is rapidly becoming the #1 consideration.
Cyber attacks are becoming increasingly common across the globe. Many Fortune 2000 companies as well as government agences around the world are under frequent cyber attack of their core systems and services.
The opportunity for cyber attacks grows daily as these corporations and governments continue to amass information about individuals in complex networks across the Web. At the same time new generations of cyber activists, some motivated purely by money and others by the desire to expose and destabilize corporations and governments, continue to hack into organizational secrets.
No enterprise, no matter how small or benign, will ever be safe from attack in the future, with an estimated 250,000 site breaches reported in the last few years.
How best to cope with the growing number of these cyber security threats? Ensure your Data Center is cloud enabled and architected with security as a top priority.
Increasing demands on Bandwidth and Capacity
Newly emerging technologies and services will only saturate data networks even more in the future. These include data-intensive applications as high quality video streaming required for medical, video conferencing and other enterprise purposes. These services are needed to expand our digital economy.
Overall data use is increasing rapidly as tablets, smartphones and applications squeeze more data through wired and wireless broadband networks.
Green Data Centers
Data center vendors understand that it is not only cool to operate green data centers but very cost effective in most cases.
A growing number of tech companies are harnessing the Artic region's abundant cold air to open new data centers to cool their servers and thereby cutting expensive air-conditioning out of the cost equation.
In addition, many organizations are drawn by the irresistable promise of lower electricity costs to operate their data centers. As one example, the opening of a data center that is located just south of the Artic circle where the average low in January is 3 degrees Fahrenheit can result in substantial savings. Utilizing free outside cold air can result in many millions of dollars in savings per year for each data center.
Additionally, the physical location of a data center is becoming less important as global broadband communications improve and the communications costs decrease. As always, it is important for CIOs to consider the data center location when building their capacity plans but now they have more options then ever before to choose from.
A decade ago it was wise to locate your data center as close to your end users as possible but today that is not the case. Data centers are popping up in Buffalo, NY near hydroelectric plants from Niagara falls as well as in the mountains of Montana and the plains of North Dakota.
Data centers are among the most ravenous energy eaters around. They were responsible for about 1.3% of the world's electricity use in 2010, according to a recent study conducted for the New York Times by Jon Koomey, a consulting professor at Stanford University.
Reducing Operating Expensive
Changes in the global economy and the desire to achieve greater business value associated with IT investment are creating more pressure to control costs. despite more stringent requirements for high availability and resiliency, this is particularly relevant for the ongoing operational costs associated with maintaining IT and data center networks.
To learn more about the future of the data center please visit.
Published by myITview.com
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