Enterprise Servers' Role with Big Data Bandwidth Requirements

Enterprise servers must be adapted to account for changes in computing demands, an important consideration when it comes to the choosing your network bandwidth providers.  Used in healthcare research, industrial machinery monitoring and omni-channel customer relationship management, big data puts increasing processing, storage and security demands on servers. Here are just a few of the ways companies are reacting to the need for technological innovation:

Enterprise Servers to Support Traffic in All Directions
One route many companies take in the effort to expand their storage capabilities is through the increased utilization of virtual machines for OS and application support. Big data applications and the data they deal with, can take up a huge amount of room.  Enterprises often spend a lot on big data processing and monitoring solutions such as a security information and event management services, only to find that they quickly intake too much data to store effectively with their new tools, according to Gartner analyst Anton Chuvakin.

However, integrating virtual machines into the data center may put pressure on enterprise servers - legacy switches and port trunking gave old servers additional capacity, but big data may render even these solutions obsolete, according to Register's Trevor Pott. The north to south hierarchical model of network design may need to focus more on east to west support. Currently, data traffic within the data center often has to proceed through several switches to move from one server to another. Software defined networking may help mitigate the number of hops traffic has to make in the increasingly east to west data center. This can help improve big data-handling capacity while enabling companies to avoid having to procure a ton of new servers.

High-Performance Enterprise Servers and Energy Efficiency
One consideration that many companies still navigate when it comes to investing in higher-performance solutions such as SDN and VMs is avoiding seeing energy use and costs rise with computing power, wrote Enterprise Networking Planet contributor Arthur Cole. Capacity and performance expansion without a corresponding increase in power envelopes and energy footprint is the goal, but it is only recently that energy efficiency became a top priority for many network architecture and data center decision-makers.

"Now that networking, too, has joined the virtualization party, with all its attendant scalability issues, the search is on for new networking architectures that can ramp up performance without pushing energy consumption to unsustainable levels," Cole wrote.

Investment in enterprise server hardware innovations is one way to increase computing demands without electricity costs rising. Efficient processors like ARM (News - Alert) chipsets can be deployed within legacy network infrastructure to help increase computing power while prolonging hardware refresh cycles. 

Lifting Technologies Help Avoid Issues
Whether enterprises are reconfiguring server arrangements to take advantage of more streamlined east to west traffic or installing next-gen processing chips to facilitate higher performance, it's crucial that they not reduce the value of their new investment by damaging servers. ServerLIFT's lifting technologies are critical when moving enterprise servers around by protecting assets, data and personnel in the process.