infoTECH Feature

April 06, 2011

How the Data Center is Changing

In addition to traditional requirements such as meeting mission-critical applications’ service level agreements (SLA), ensuring high Quality of Experience (QoE) and supporting traffic capacity growth, today’s data centers are going through major technological and business transformations to improve IT utilization and reduce CAPEX and OPEX (News - Alert).  These shifts extend to adopting data center consolidation and virtualization technologies, adopting orchestration systems to increase workflow automation, standardizing a “scale-as-you-grow” model for cost-effective scalability, driving business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) initiatives, leveraging multi-layer security solutions to effectively protect from multi-vector attacks as well as enabling new operational models such as private cloud.

Data center consolidation and virtualization
Data center consolidation and virtualization allows for the reduction of the number of data centers as well as the number of servers and network infrastructure elements inside the data center, to reduce costs associated with electricity, cooling, space, management, spare units and more. Just like server virtualization enables the reduction of the number of physical servers by allowing to run multiple, logical server instances on fewer physical servers, network infrastructure virtualization enables for the reduction of the number of network infrastructure elements – such as switches, routers and Application Delivery Controllers (ADC (News - Alert)) – while ensuring that application SLAs are met without sacrificing computing resources at the expense of another.

This means that standardizing on a solution - which ensures performance predictability via a resource reservation mechanism – coupled with complete isolation between the different instances – to guarantee that each application gets all of the resources it requires - will run flawlessly while providing faster response times to end-users. As a result, an ADC virtualization solution enables greater business agility by allowing to rapidly provision, migrate or decommission ADC services – with no risk or hardware changes at all. 

Workflow automation and orchestration
As the data center becomes more complex, more business processes and applications rely on multiple solutions and products from different vendors. Therefore, it is becoming critical to enable process workflow automation to reduce operational costs, increase IT agility and reduce risk. Centralized management and orchestration systems, which leverage the solution’s open APIs, are being adopted by customers to enable data center automation and to have complete end-to-end visibility and control over various data center operations.

On demand data center scalability
Today’s data center managers are required to scale their data center “on demand”, breaking the vicious cycle of a 2-3 year platform refreshment period and extending it to 5-6 years, hence allowing to address future network and business demand with minimal changes to existing hardware. This “scale-as-you-grow” approach, which often uses a software-based license mechanism, enables customers to pay exactly for what they need today and scale on demand when they need more capacity in the future, thus reducing capacity planning risk and ensuring best investment protection.  

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR)
In light of the recent earthquakes and tsunami in Japan, it is evident that customers must have a disaster recovery (DR) solution in place when operating a multi-location data center. The absence of a DR solution implies negative impact as the business execution might be compromised and sometimes completely halted – causing monetary loss and severe reputation damage. A DR solution should provide immediate, automatic failover and failback to ensure undisrupted business operation – even during a time of disaster. A key component of a DR initiative is a global server load balancing (GSLB) solution which ensures transaction completion to all users, at all locations, at all times by leveraging network proximity and site load measurements.

Multi-layered security protection
The recent WikiLeaks security attacks – as well as the recent attacks on South Korean targets - exhibited that today’s security attacks span multiple attack vectors and techniques such as SYN flood protection, TCP floods, UDP (News - Alert) floods, resource starvation attacks, vulnerability attacks, web application attacks and more. To effectively mitigate such attacks, it is crucial to have in place an attack mitigation solution which can successfully defeat such a complex attack by combining a set of security protection engines including behavioral Denial of Service (DoS) protection, Intrusion (News - Alert) Prevention System (IPS), Network Behavioral Analysis (NBA) capabilities, anti-phishing and Web Application Firewall (WAF).   Such a security solution should also provide real-time and historical reports as well as statistics to allow rapid root cause analysis to ensure undisrupted business availability - even when under attack.

Enabling private cloud models
Private clouds gain more momentum as a means to allocate and get resources on demand, without requiring to have and maintain these resources locally. To support this trend, there is a clear need for a much more agile data center which allows for the leveraging of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Iaas) or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) models – enabling to provision and decommission data center components resources in a modular and on-demand manner.


Amir Peles is Chief Technology Officer at Radware (News - Alert). To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Janice McDuffee
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