With time, as the competitive market grows, businesses need to focus on the effectiveness of their IT operations. A smooth data flow can ensure a company’s services run efficiently, which can become beneficial for its position in the market.
To make it possible, a data center comes into play that makes IT operations, data storage, and transfer a breeze. However, for a data center to be optimal, its architecture must be well-considered.
Key Takeaways
- Definition: Data center architecture is the physical and logical blueprint for equipment, cabling, and security workflows within a facility.
- Standard Framework: Most architectures follow a three-tier model consisting of the Core, Aggregation, and Access layers.
- Core Components: Efficiency depends on the integration of networking, computing, and security architectures.
- Modern Models: Beyond the multi-tier model, enterprises use Mesh, Super Spine, and Point of Delivery (PoD) designs to improve scalability and reduce latency.
Overview of data center architecture
Data center architecture is the physical and logical layout of all resources and equipment inside a data center facility. Its ultimate purpose is to maximize performance, keep operational costs in check, and uphold strong data protection and connectivity standards. In simple terms, data center architecture serves as a blueprint for a data center facility’s design and deployment.
This architectural layout serves as a starting point during the data center’s site construction phase to establish connections between servers and switches. It also provides guidelines on where and how the computing server and other data center resources like racks, storage networking, and more will be placed in the data center facility.
Other than deciding the physical placement of resources and equipment, the data center architecture creates a layout for the interconnection of the server and other data center resources. In addition, the data center architecture even decides the arrangement of the physical and logical security workflows within data centers.
The basis of data center network architecture is a layered approach that, over the years, has been tested and improved in various large-scale implementations of data centers globally. This multi-tier model foundation of a data center design assists the organization or enterprise in improving its scalability, overall performance, services, flexibility, maintenance, and resiliency.
Hence, a carefully planned data center architecture layout is necessary to support the smooth IT operations of any organization and ensure its services are available without a hitch for users. Today, that blueprint must also accommodate cloud computing, big data analytics, and an ever-expanding fleet of IoT devices, each of which pushes new performance and scalability requirements.
Another significant benefit of a well-planned data center network architecture is that it can help a company deploy and support its new services quickly, giving them a competitive advantage.
So, to acquire a carefully considered data center architecture layout, special focus must be given to access layers uplink bandwidth, oversubscription, true server capacity, port density, and more.
Brief guide to data centers
Before we jump right into the details of data center architecture, it is essential to have a thorough understanding of what a data center is. This section of this in-depth article will also briefly discuss what constitutes the data center infrastructure components and technologies and what vital role an enterprise data center facility has.
In its simplest form in the world of Information Technology (IT), a data center is a physical facility, a designated space, or multiple private locations within an organization’s building where its entire data resides.
This data center facility primarily houses the company’s or organization’s computer systems and equipment along with related components like the telecommunication network and storage systems.
The physical facility of data centers makes it possible for an enterprise to manage and operate its IT servers, applications conveniently, and processing to ensure effective business continuity. It can be either small or large-scale, depending upon the information technology operations and activities of the said enterprise.
Even though the data center design or the data center architecture can differ from one enterprise to another, the data center infrastructure components and technologies are more or less the same.
Plenty of data center types exist that are classified according to ownership, center architecture, infrastructure components, and technologies and equipment used for data storage and computing. On these bases, the four main data center types include:
- Managed Services Data Centers: Instead of buying a data center facility, the company leases infrastructure and equipment and lets a managed services provider or third party manage it.
- Enterprise Data Center: This type of data center is owned, designed, and operated by the company, and it is end users optimized. Often, these data centers are housed within the corporate building.
- Colocation Data Centers: Colocation data centers are owned by others, hosting all the necessary infrastructure, and a company rents a space within them to manage the storage, firewall, and server.
- Cloud Data Centers: These data centers are off-premises, and a public clouds services provider hosts the company’s applications and data.
Why is a data center crucial for business operations?
The convenience and efficiency offered by data centers make them an essential asset for every enterprise. A data center facility enables the provision of shared access to the company’s data and applications through an intricate network, storage, and compute infrastructure.
Besides making data highly available and enabling the delivery of services and resources to employees, remote users, and customers globally, the well-mapped data center design even ensures data security.
Incorporating an efficient data center can streamline and support various business activities and applications such as:
- Managing and sharing files and emails
- Customer Relationship Management
- Logical security workflows
- Service module integration
- Databases and resource planning
- Networking
- Data backup and recovery
- Host websites
- Support cloud storage applications
- E-commerce transactions, and more.
Data centers also play a vital role in a company’s disaster recovery plans by outsourcing power needs, which helps prevent data loss and reduces latency and bandwidth issues. They also keep the servers functioning in case of a power disaster or technology glitch.
In short, as technology advances and organizations change their business scalability, constant reliability is required to operate and manage applications and activities efficiently. Hence, this need for reliability can be fulfilled by opting for a data center facility that has the ability to deliver secure and fast access to data and provide streamlined services.
Furthermore, since data centers ensure servers remain functional 24/7, companies can focus entirely on their core processes, like user objectives and scalability, instead of spending high costs and time on IT maintenance.
Data center components and facility infrastructure
The data center facility is a site or space where infrastructure is deployed. Since this physical facility houses various essential data center resources and data center technologies, a proper site layout is necessary. Hence, a data center facility should have the following features:
- It should be located on an accessible site that offers adequate floor space.
- The site should have an ample and affordable power supply to power and operate the installed IT infrastructure.
- Sufficient cooling technologies must be installed on the data center site. As the heavy amount of data computing consumes excessive power, it can generate a lot of heat energy, overheating the data center environment. So, HVAC systems and other cooling technologies must be incorporated into the data center design to remove heat from IT equipment, ensuring servers remain functional.
- As highly critical data resides in a data center, solid security measures must be deployed on the site. The data center space should have sufficient physical security and logical security workflows to secure networks and data.
- To oversee and ensure the performance of a data center facility, a building management system should also be incorporated into the data center design. It allows the IT personnel to supervise the data center’s power, temperature, and security control.
Core components
- Computing resources like servers and blade servers.
- Storage infrastructure like disk arrays to store and manage personalized content and data.
- Network infrastructure to enable storage networking, remote direct memory access, default gateway redundancy, and data access layers.
- Other data center resources and infrastructure like cables, racks, backup power supply, switches, routers, firewalls, etc.
- Management and automation tools that monitor, automate, and optimize data center operations.
Basic layered framework of data center architecture
The data center architecture is a multi-tier model, typically composed of three layers that are:
The core layer
The core layer provides quick backplane switching for efficient transfer of data across every network involved in the data center. This layer of the data center architecture enables the connection to multiple aggregation modules and delivers a flexible Layer 3 network routed fabric. It helps in balancing web search and server traffic between the aggregation layers and the campus’ data center network core.
The aggregation layer
The aggregation layer modules primarily deliver high-speed bandwidth export with lower latency for the server cluster. This layer aids essential data center functions like Layer 2 broadcast domain, service module integration, default gateway redundancy, and spanning tree processing.
Traffic travels quickly from server to server through the convergence layer, and various application optimization and security services are deployed. These services include firewall integration, content switching, load balancing, board switches for application acceleration, SSL offload, network analysis, intrusion detection, etc.
The access layer
In this layer, the server farms are physically attached to the data center network, enabling high-density access. The physically attached server components in the access layers include mainframes, blade servers, clustered servers, and multiple access layer switches.
These components, for example, the servers, and switches in the access layer, help fulfill the administrative and server broadcast domain requirements.
Standard data center architecture composition
A data center offers various functions to support the services of an organization and its Information Technology operations. In order to deliver the required performance, data center architecture is composed of three components.
These are data center network architecture, data center computing architecture, and data center security architecture. Other components, like the data center information and physical architecture, serve as a support infrastructure in the data center design.
Data center network architecture
The data center network architecture (DCN) is a layout of networking components that link all of the resources in a data center together. It has long been a focus of research for public internet and public clouds providers. This data center architecture composition incorporates routers and switches placed in a two or three-tier topology, for example, fat tree DCN, DCell, three-level DCN, etc.
Data center computing architecture
The data center computing architecture helps minimize transmission latency and bandwidth issues by allowing the moving of computer resources to where the data resides. In modern deployments, this layer routinely leverages virtualization and automated resource scheduling to squeeze more performance out of existing hardware while keeping energy use under control. This model is one of the core components of data center architecture. It plays a vital role in scalability, rapid deployment, lowering capital expenditure costs, and efficient utilization of data center resources.
Data center security architecture
Data center security architecture is the umbrella term for the digital technologies and physical procedures used to safeguard data centers from intrusions, unauthorized access, and threats. The lack of effective security measures in a data center may pose a high risk for data breaches by hackers.
Key elements include:• Physical security – gated access, surveillance, and strict on-site controls to keep unauthorized personnel out. • Logical security – firewalls, intrusion detection, and access management that shield internal networks from external threats. By layering both controls, organizations drastically reduce the risk of breaches.
Four models of data center architecture
| Architecture Model | Best Use Case | Key Characteristics |
|---|---|---|
| Multi-tier | Standard Enterprise | Three-tier (Core, Aggregation, Access) layered approach for scalability. |
| Mesh Network | Cloud Services | Interconnecting switches providing low latency and predictable capacity. |
| Super Spine Mesh | Large-scale Campus | Designed for high volumes of data moving across multiple data halls. |
| Mesh PoD | Modular Expansion | Interconnected leaf switches that increase manageability and modularity. |
Bottom line
As technological advancements and improvements occur, data center requirements keep on exceeding. Hence, a well-thought data center architecture is necessary to cater to the demands for efficient IT operations.
It should incorporate all the infrastructure and resources required in a data center in a layered approach to ensure data flows, applications, and services deliver results without a hitch.
