Recently, the U.S. federal government announced one of the largest data center consolidation projects in history, in which more than 1,100 data centers across the United States will be consolidated into a smaller number of much larger data centers. Leading corporations such as HP and Intel (News - Alert) are also undertaking massive data center consolidation; HP is consolidating 85 data centers into 6, and Intel, 133 data centers to 8 new, highly-dense data centers.
These examples represent two very clear benefits to consolidating data centers – cost reduction and operational simplicity. Cost reduction includes the implementation of Green IT by reducing the overall energy and real estate footprint, as well as the cost of hardware, software and operational staff. With fewer data centers, organizations can meet compliance regulations more easily, handle security threats more efficiently and enhance overall business agility. Still, data center consolidation is able to increase availability, complexity and capacity requirements even while there are many more applications deployed on fewer servers across a small number of physical locations.
With more ‘eggs in each basket’, consolidation places increasing pressure on the newly consolidated data center to ensure availability, resiliency, and business continuity. To ensure around-the-clock availability, today’s solutions must address failure recovery at all levels, whether a local failure of a server/application, or a complete data center outage resulting from a network flood or security attack. A global solution for disaster recovery between remote data centers is a crucial component in any solution to guarantee business continuity.
End-to-end performance monitoring and application optimization must be enforced to guarantee the best Quality of Experience to users despite slow application response time, network bottlenecks or peak time traffic. Even though consolidated data centers are physically farther away from end users, they are still required to provide consistent or even improved user experience while ensuring each application meets its Service Level Agreement without negatively affecting other applications. The Application Delivery solution should be able to concurrently serve a very large number of applications while simplifying management and monitoring of SLAs.
Application acceleration technology offloads work from the servers, not only resulting in less active servers, as well as reduction of real estate and power consumption, but also enhanced end-user QoE. Additionally, advanced bandwidth management technologies can be deployed to further help IT managers meet SLA requirements.
Capacity requirements of a consolidated data center increase significantly, and it becomes more challenging to plan capacity growth as it involves additional risks factors. To meet growth requirements and eliminate capacity planning risks, the deployed solution requires a degree of flexibility so it can allow IT managers to scale throughput capacity and add application-aware services on demand, in a cost effective manner without hardware replacement. Additionally, to support the high bandwidth of consolidated data centers, multiple 10 Gigabit ports are required for connectivity and high performing devices should be deployed to guarantee very fast response time, application acceleration and completion of thousands of transactions per second.
The infrastructure in a consolidated data center is largely virtualized today, a trend that is likely to continue in the future. Therefore, the Application Delivery solution should work closely with a virtualization infrastructure to guarantee elastic and flexible management of virtualized servers.
To guarantee the data center’s ability to handle peak traffic, the consolidated data center should not be built for extreme capacity. Cloud providers are offering simple, on-demand availability of resources that can be used for handling overloads. The Application Delivery Controller takes part in identifying extreme amounts of traffic and redirecting excess traffic served by an available cloud resource.
To conclude, data center consolidation is one of the most popular IT trends, and while its benefits are clear and tangible, the move also creates challenges which need careful addressing by the Application Delivery solution.
Amir Peles is Chief Technology Officer at Radware