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While the 90s were about information, today is about answers. Answers drive our society. Whether you are a search engine, a Fortune 500 company, or a researcher at a national laboratory, answers are your business and the ability to provide them quickly and cost effectively is a distinct competitive advantage.
Today's high performance data center needs to generate answers rapidly and requires that the right people can seamlessly access those answers. Answers are dynamic and must be accurate. Additionally, the more accurate answers a business can produce in a given time, the more revenue it can generate. And as the world and workforces disperse, there must be fast and reliable connections from anywhere at any time for the data center to help increase efficiency and competitiveness.
Enabling the rise of this high performance data center are the following technological changes:
- High performance, cost-effective computing
- High-speed storage access and backup
- Embedded security and dynamic denial of service protection
- High-speed, congestion-free networks
- Virtualizing a centralized network and assets
To ensure accuracy and speed of answers, a high performance cluster computing architecture that leverages the total processing power of a business is required. With a cluster computing architecture in place, businesses can then feed it with information.
The ability to rapidly access stored information and answers is crucial to interpreting available information. This requires high-speed access and backup to a storage network. If answers are revenue, it is important to ensure that the right people are accessing the right content. Advanced dynamic denial of service protection and embedded security at the system level are required to limit and allow access where, when and by whom it is needed.
Next, making the disparate pieces of the data center infrastructure work together requires a high performance network. No longer simply providing transportation, but linking tens of thousands of servers, databases and other computational resources, the network becomes involved in the creation of the answers. As such, it must be both fast and congestion-free to ensure accurate answers are delivered rapidly. And it is resilient, high capacity systems that provide the scalability and availability to seamlessly interconnect the pieces of potentially geographically distributed infrastructure.
Finally, the distinction between centralized storage and computing versus distributed storage and computing must be transparent to the user community. By enabling anytime access to the network from any external locations, businesses can more effectively leverage their infrastructure to create answers.
In today's high performance data center, where information transformed into answers is the currency, information technology is regaining its role as a strategic asset that enables competitive advantages. This white paper explores the technologies needed to ensure businesses are prepared to meet the new challenges and opportunities of the emerging "answer economy".
Many IT organizations are currently working to solve the problems created by the explosive expansion of IT infrastructure in the late 1990's. In many instances this rapid expansion to meet business unit demand for IT has resulted in a highly complex infrastructure that offers sub-optimal reliability and security while being overly difficult to manage and expensive to operate. Some of the symptoms of excessive IT complexity are the following:
- Numerous data centers distributed throughout the organization, including ad hoc patchworks of servers located in wiring closets and computer equipment rooms.
- Large numbers of servers dedicated to single applications and provisioned for "worst-case" workload levels. Average utilization of servers in this category run as low as 10%.
- Storage subsystems that are dedicated to single servers as embedded storage or directly attached storage (DAS) systems. Single application servers with dedicated storage often utilize only 20% of available storage capacity. Low utilization has contributed to the meteoric growth in storage capacity (e.g., from 7 TeraBytes (TB) in 1996 to 48 TB in 2002 for the average Fortune 500 company). Dedicated storage also requires dedicated back-up facilities and makes consistent data protection policies difficult to implement.
- Numerous older generation fixed configuration and modular Ethernet switches providing connectivity within the data center and to the remainder of the enterprise network. Older generation Ethernet switches may support only 10/100 server connections and often have relatively low port counts.
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