Data Center Virtualization

A data center is a centralized storage area for physical or virtual data. The main use of data centers is storage and they should remain online constantly to accommodate the needs of users. A data center can be classified into 4 tiers and each one has its own significant requirements. Since IT companies are growing dynamically, they need their own virtualized data centers. What is virtualization and what is the need for virtualizing a data center?

Data Center Virtualizatin Technology

Virtualization is a technology which drives the application and servers to work in an uncommitted manner, interacting with the user’s needs to do the job in hand. It can bring a flexible data center, consolidation and standardization to a company. The key objective for an organization to run successfully is for the business to run trouble-free round the clock. For that, you need to have multiple data centers set up, each provided with the virtual applications and data. Not all data needs to be virtual, only the data which is critical for the organization. What are the benefits to be obtained by virtualizing a data center? It saves you cost for infrastructure and a simplified management process. Virtualization is done for each server so that if you need a server to stop acting or functioning, you can simply take it out and it doesn’t affect the other functioning servers. The maintenance and management of a virtualized data center is very significant for an organization.

Data Center Virtualization, Data Center Virtualization Solution

Data center security Overview, Security and Virtualization in the Data Center

Data Center Virtualization Scenarios

There are two virtualization scenarios which need to be followed in managing the physical and virtual infrastructure. They are:

• Server Consolidation
• Business Continuity

Server Consolidation reduces the costs of hardware components, space, power and management. Business Continuity makes the servers available to run 24/7 and maximizes the system run time.

You can centralize the management for better security reasons rather than giving security to each and every server. To make things simple, data centers need to be given virtualization. You can define the security policies based on the people who are requesting access and what is allowed to access the applications. Virtualization also provides security to stop hackers from accessing the applications. The essential factors that you need to maintain data centers are humidity, air pressure and temperature which are to be maintained according to the product specifications. The data center rooms must be monitored by someone, so that any decrease or changes in those factors can be returned to normal or else it could cause great damage. Routing a data center is also essential in order to avoid incorrect neighbor peering. The data center routing design is shown in the second diagram. To prevent incorrect routing, several measures need to be taken. These measures are Route peer authentication, Route filtering and Log neighbor changes.

Security service traffic flow, Security and Virtualization in the Data Center

The virtualization can be done both in storage and block storage.  Storage virtualization preserves different physical storages as a single virtual storage, whereas the Block storage virtualization blocks or forms a gateway for the network attached storage systems in order to protect the storage information. Certain organizations use redundancy sites so that they can resolve user’s requests at any time, but they fail when their organization grows and is in need of a secondary site. If people want to access your network from all over the world, at any time and from any location, then the sites might go down which automatically leads you to a low performance stage. This is where virtualization comes into action. The virtualization is integrated with access technologies like SSN and VPN so that the users will be directed to the best site. This gives them full access control over the applications and networks without any interruption. Virtualizing data centers thus satisfies a need in your company’s growth.

IT Resources Consideration

When the Virtualization of IT resources are considered, one has to take into consideration the overall critical stages of the network topology. What’s your existing atmosphere? Do you have numerous data centers? Do you have provision for various ISP links from other providers? Are there programs that are needed for virtualizing? What kind of devices are they coming from to get to the applications? Is there a need to accelerate and secure the sessions across that variety of application scenarios? What are the goals, SLAs and objectives for the business? All these criteria have to be considered before setting up the virtualization. Making it possible for one to virtualize the data centers will really take your company standards to a different level. If an IT company has reduced the number of servers working without making any proper adjustments to the cooling devices then the effectiveness of data centers will go down resulting in a company failing.

Spreading the load, that is, splitting the servers as a rack lessens the consumption of power and no new power or cooling systems will be needed. Spreading the load has disadvantages too, such as an increase in cabling costs. Higher density racks will require a lot of cables and you need to check whether the floor can withstand these weights. Perhaps a supplement to the number of cooling systems will be necessary for these devices so that they are maintained to the temperature specified in the product. The cooling systems can be air conditioners or fans which yield the necessary cooling conditions.

Virtualizatin Effects on Data Center

Virtualization may decrease the overall power consumption for the organization if it is maintained properly. As the virtualization effect in data centers is unique, care should be taken with the power supplies and cooling systems to the components. Virtualizing data centers also gives you the benefit of booting a virtual machine from a powered off state. Thus by virtualizing a data center it can support more applications and maintain higher standards. A few years ago, companies had virtualization in their infrastructure rather than in data centers, but now data centers have been virtualized for better organization with a fewer number of servers and thus reducing the cost of expenses in all ways. Virtualizing data centers is neither complicated nor costly, and it reduces both your expenses and the space taken up by servers.

You can also keep up to date with current trends and technology by visiting Data Center Talk where we keep you informed on important changes as they occur.