Thanks, Tech101.
The building of those data centers is the focus of considerable discussion and speculation these days. How many data centers built today will constitute enough for the near-, intermediate- and longer- terms? Will there ever be enough? What are the implications of siting data centers closer to power generation, despite not being sited optimally for the propagation of data to and from population centers (note the performance criteria covered in the Riverbed white paper, below). What is the intrinsic, toal impact - i.e., ignoring externalities for the moment - of all of those data centers on the nation's energy resources, the electric power grid, and the national economy as a whole? When will the inevitable return to mid-range and mainframe computers take place (or will it?), and what would such a shift mean in terms of disruption to the arrayed PC server farm architectures being built today? If anyone should happen to come across a paper or thesis that breaks these issues down, kindly post it to the forum. TIA.
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On a related note, the following, related white paper on remote IT infrastructure consolidation just appeared in my inbox, so I thought I'd attach it here, as well:
A Riverbed Technology White Paper:
The 3 Barriers to Centralizing Remote Infrastructure
Remote IT Infrastructure Consolidation
Introduction
Fortune 1000 CIOs are making the strategic choice to consolidate remote site IT infrastructure into central data centers. They are compelled to move some or all remote file servers, email servers, backup, and other servers because through such site consolidation they can jointly address the need to reduce remote site operating costs and mandates for more rigorous security and compliance.
The stumbling block to consolidation, however, is the severe impact on application performance as seen by remote users. Relocating local servers to a data center and connecting them across a wide area network (WAN) link often results in order-of-magnitude slowdowns to response times and data transfer rates. At these levels of delay business processes are impacted forcing site consolidation efforts to be stalled.
CIOs often discover that upgrading bandwidth to remote sites has little or no effect on application performance. The problem lies instead with the way the applications interact with the server across the WAN. Microsoft Windows file systems, Microsoft Exchange®, NAS, backup applications, CAD applications, and many others were developed with the idea that the client and server were local. Across the WAN, however, where congestion, resource contention, diverse routing conditions, and high latencies exist, these applications grind to a crawl.
Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances use a new combination of patented and patent-pending mechanisms to achieve application acceleration. These mechanisms include transaction prediction, TCP proxying and optimization, and hierarchical compression to deliver orders of magnitude increases in application response time and throughput.
Because Riverbed systematically addresses each of the issues affecting application performance over the WAN Riverbed helps companies to consolidate remote server infrastructure and deliver consistent end-to-end application performance without resorting to expensive and often ineffective upgrades to WAN bandwidth.
Why Consolidate?
Remote site server consolidation is a clear win in terms of reducing operating costs and improving data security. However, there were compelling reasons for distributing server infrastructure in the first place.
The reason many companies chose to place servers at remote sites has been to deliver consistent application performance to remote users working with local data sets. Microsoft Exchange servers, for example, have commonly been deployed at remote sites with only 20-30 users because above those numbers, most Exchange messages end up being between local users.
Consolidation of remote site infrastructure offers significant benefits:
- Reduces cost and complexity
- Improves compliance
- Improves data and network security
- Improves resource utilization
- Eliminates need for costly WAN bandwidth upgrades
- Eliminates write consistency issues associated with caching
- Frees up WAN capacity for VoIP and video applications
Provisioning of servers at remote sites, however, often leads to low resource utilization and high costs. Since Exchange servers are typically resourced for a capacity of several thousand users, deploying a dedicated server for a few dozen means inefficient use of server resources. This same issue exists for file servers, and web servers. Worse, all those servers have to be managed, backed up, repaired, and patched.
Centralizing servers at a data center means greater resource utilization, and fewer servers to backup and patch. Since complexity is reduced, such consolidation also means lower IT staff requirements, less chance for errors, and better system security.
Because of the clear benefits, companies are trying to consolidate infrastructure as much as possible, yet many are surprised at how difficult it is to actually complete a successful site consolidation project. They find they can’t deliver consistent end-to-end application performance even with significant upgrades to WAN bandwidth.
Continued at:
computerworld.com
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FAC |
