How data centers are changing right now: Energy efficiency, data storage and the "clouds"
This week we talked about the pros and cons of the virtual IT infrastructure and talked about how to choose the direction for the development of an IT project based on our experience working on the virtual infrastructure provider 1cloud .
Today I would like to talk about technological trends and areas that are developing in the field of data storage and management, IT infrastructure and data centers. The emergence of new technologies and approaches to building infrastructure has a major impact on how data centers now look and on what they will be in the near future.
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One of the most ambitious trends is the ubiquitous penetration of cloud technologies - if in 2012, according to various studies and surveys, no more than a third of companies used such technologies, then in 2016, the hybrid cloud approach was used by 77%. But the clouds themselves are not the only factor shaping the look of a modern data center . Today we will talk about how data centers are changing right now, and what factors contribute to this.
Cloud technologies change everything
The development of virtualization technologies has led to the active proliferation of "clouds" - according to Gartner, in 2016 cloud resources will account for a significant portion of the costs of all IT budgets. And according to the manufacturer of telecommunications equipment Cisco, by 2018, up to 78% of all workloads will be handled by cloud-based data centers. By the same year, 59% of the total cloud load will fall on SaaS. Goldman Sachs predicts that the cloud infrastructure market by 2018 will grow by more than 19.5% from 2015, reaching $ 43 billion by the deadline.
The growing popularity of cloud technologies and their wider application is changing the way the data center itself. Experts list several reasons that have affected the way data centers operate and operate. For example, the desire of companies to achieve a more flexible and efficient use of resources actually led to the emergence of a new profession of “architects” - these people manage the infrastructure in order to achieve its greatest efficiency. When designing and managing data centers, new approaches are used: from DevOps to DCIM .
“Iron” itself has undergone changes - the concept of “ convergent infrastructure ” requires greater efficiency. In this regard, companies are increasingly introducing technologies that can provide greater power density while reducing the area occupied by the data center. In addition, clouds have had a significant impact on the evolution of network and storage solutions — from direct hardware to new types of applications that handle client requests.
Energy efficiency
According to Statista.com, just a couple of years ago, in 2012, the annual volume of data center traffic was 1 exabyte, and in 2015 it approached 3 exabytes. Experts predict that in 2019 data center traffic will be 8.6 exabytes per year. To maintain the health of systems that process such data volumes, a lot of energy is required. According to research firm Forsythe, by 2020, US-based data centers will consume six times more energy than all of New York.
Many modern data centers were designed and built from a few years to a couple of decades ago. This means that it is difficult for them to meet the growing demands and the load on the data center. Companies that manage data centers are trying to increase power density by creating a more compact infrastructure with fewer racks that can hold more servers. This allows not only to save space and resources that were required for its heating and cooling, but also to get rid of excess infrastructure (wires, raised floors, ventilation, etc.)
Many previously designed data centers today do not meet the needs of modern converged infrastructure - as a result, the power of one rack can be consumed by one or two devices, and the rest of the space remains unused. This leads to serious financial losses and inefficient use of resources. Taking into account the problem of “comatose” servers (which do not perform any useful work - in the United States alone there are up to 30% of all machines, and in the world there are up to 10 million such servers), the losses can be even higher.
Therefore, an increasing number of data centers are beginning to work on increasing the "density" of their capacities. And experts call it one of the trends of the current year.
Changing the way data center is built: disks and flash memory
Many experts are confident that the development of storage technology and flash memory will lead to a change in the structure of data centers. In the past couple of years, several promising developments have been presented, starting with 256-gigabit 48-layer chips from Samsung and Toshiba, which have extremely high reading speeds and consume 40% less energy than 128-gigabit devices of previous generations, and ending with non-volatile Intel-Micron 3D Xpoint technology.
It has a thousand times less latency than flash. This technology is capable of generating a new category of non-volatile memory: fast enough to use the DRAM bus, and large enough to store a large amount of data.
The developers of data center architectures are already experimenting with emerging new data storage technologies. In particular, the experience of creating a cluster of flash memory chips running a chip that emulates a disk controller is known. This SSD replaces hard drives in critical locations - and this is what has been happening in data centers for several years now.
In addition, the attempts to transfer the processed data from the disks to the RAM do not stop. Experts predict the emergence of all-flash-data warehouses created using DDR, DRAM and DIMM technologies on flash.
As a result, the data storage structure will change dramatically - a small amount of DRAM will become a large array of high-performance flash memory, which will allow you to “bypass” the operating system and the hypervisor while working with server DIMMs in direct access mode. This will significantly reduce latency, and data storage can be located as close as possible to the servers themselves, even in the case of cloud data centers. As a result, DRAM, DIMM flash, memory connected by the RDMA channel, and cold storage form concentric cache layers, creating a seamless architecture that seamlessly transitions from the first-level cache to the permanent storage at the other end of the network.
Conclusion
Business is always striving to reduce costs and increase revenue. At the same time, IT technologies play an increasing role in the lives of hundreds of thousands of companies around the world. Their leaders do not want to lose money because of downtime - and, nevertheless, even in North America, companies lose $ 26.5 billion every year due to failures of IT systems - or, for example, hacker attacks.
This means that technologies and approaches that will make it possible to achieve more efficient use of the current infrastructure and increase security will become widespread. Therefore, the development trends listed in the article will only gain power over the coming years.
PS Our posts on the development of a virtual infrastructure provider 1cloud :
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/283044/
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