With advantages in cloud computing, hyperscale data centers are becoming all the rage. While some companies are still leery of the cloud computing phenomenon, the latest data center news indicates many others have jumped on board and are now implementing their own hyperscale data center. If your company is considering it, here are three things you’ll want to keep in mind.
Hyperscale Data Centers Defined
These centers are designed to provide one widespread scalable compute architecture made up of small servers called nodes that provide storage and networking. The nodes are clustered together and managed as a single entity. They have been extremely popular with large companies like Google and Amazon and have become the fastest growing component of IT infrastructure around the world.
No Additional Space Required
Hyperscale data centers are built with easily obtained, ready made products, also known as commercial off the shelf (COS) equipment. Since the millions of servers used are virtual, there is no additional space required. There is also no additional cooling or electrical power required. What gets saved in hardware costs can be put towards custom software.
Storage
One of the biggest problems faced by companies implementing hyperscale architectures has been limited storage technology. While companies are moving towards using solid state disk (SSD), some are finding that SSDs aren’t meeting the capacity demands of large scale enterprises due to limited storage density. One alternative has been to use PCIe SSDs which has a huge amount of storage and runs at optimal speeds.
Start Small But Think Big
When building hyperscale architectures, it is good practice to start small. This keeps upfront costs as low as possible. As demand grows, the infrastructure can expand simply by adding nodes to the cluster. The scale-out software used has been designed to make node aggregation a relatively seamless process. This way the data center can be grown at the same pace as the number of customers.
There will most likely be some companies who are slow to make the switch but when it comes to the quickly changing world of IT, hyperscale data centers may become the norm rather than the exception.