Industry Perspective On Future Data Center Architectures; Foundation Requirements - Compaq BL10e - HP ProLiant - 512 MB RAM Introduction Manual

There are several underlying business demands that fuel these management costs:
• Increasing number of applications – competitiveness in business is often tied to bringing new
business functions and applications online quickly
• Increasing scale of applications – In both existing web-based enterprise applications and newer
Web 2.0 social media applications, applications are being scaled to levels unthinkable a decade
ago. Requirements for over 1000 servers in a single procurement for a single application are
becoming increasingly common.
• Increasing demands for availability – Almost all customer-facing applications on the web are
mission-critical, demanding commensurate availability. In some cases, external regulations for data
retention and retrieval on demand are driving availability.
As a result of these business demands, IT administrators are acquiring new server and storage
hardware faster than they are retiring it, leading to an increased number of elements to be managed.
Routine user operations like moves, adds, configuration changes, patches, updates, and physical
maintenance, can become major drains on time and budget.

Industry perspective on future data center architectures

Solving the data center problems described above requires a flexible, business-ready data center
architecture. This section uses an industry perspective to discuss two conceptual layers involved in
emerging data center architectures: a foundation layer that defines invariant characteristics, and a
layer concerned with dynamic behavior and optimization.

Foundation requirements

The foundational requirements define a set of characteristics that are desirable for almost any
environment, from small business to the large enterprise:
• Modularity and scalability – The infrastructure must be scalable, capable of providing solutions
ranging from a few elements (servers, storage and networking) to large enterprise (thousands of
elements), and eventually large cloud-style computing (tens of thousands of elements).
• Energy efficiency – As already discussed, energy efficiency has risen rapidly as a critical
technology due to increasing computing demands, increased power densities, facility constraints,
and energy cost. Architecturally, energy awareness includes both a system-level and a data center-
level component. At the system level, the integrated hardware and software need to use
energy-efficient components and take advantage of advanced features to manage power use within
systems. At a data center level, administrators should be able to accurately monitor and collect
power data, and use advanced control systems along with computation fluid dynamics to optimize
infrastructure efficiency.
• Manageability – Since overall management costs are increasingly cited as a primary concern,
reducing those costs is a primary goal. Management brings with it the unique challenge of
backward compatibility – since most installations of new technology must co-exist with legacy
installations, new management architectures and tools must give thought to legacy systems.
• Virtualized and virtualization friendly – Virtualizing server resources along with storage and
network elements is one of the major trends of the last half-decade, and a data center architecture
must embrace the concept of virtualization of all physical resources.
virtualization can take many forms, from building servers that efficiently support the latest
hypervisors to extending all of the management functions of physical machines to virtual machines,
5 While server virtualization is a relatively new phenomenon within industry-standardx86-based servers, the
concept of virtualization was developed more than 40 years ago on mainframes and has been implemented in
various ways since then.
Support for server
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