Storage Options in Data Center

•      Magnetic Tape

4  Low cost solution for long term data storage

Ø  Preferred option for backup destination in the past

4  Limitations

Ø  Sequential data access

Ø  Single application access at a time

Ø  Physical wear and tear

Ø  Storage/retrieval overheads

•      Optical discs

4  Popularly used as distribution medium in small, single-user computing environments

4  Limited in capacity and speed

4  Write once and read many (WORM): CD-ROM, DVD-ROM

4  Other variations: CD-RW, Blu-ray discs

•      Disk drive

4  Most popular storage medium

4  Large storage capacity

4  Random read/write access

•      Flash drives

4  Uses semiconductor media

4  Provide high performance and low power consumption

Application and application virtualization in DataCenter

Application :

•      A software program that provides logic for computing operations

•      Commonly deployed applications in a data center

4  Business applications – email, enterprise resource planning (ERP), decision support system (DSS)

4  Management applications – resource management, performance tuning, virtualization

4  Data protection applications – backup, replication

4  Security applications – authentication, antivirus

•      Key I/O characteristics of an application

4  Read intensive vs. write intensive

4  Sequential vs. random

4  I/O size

Application Virtualization :

Definition :

             It is the technique of presenting an application to an end user without any installation, integration, or dependencies on the underlying computing platform.

•      Allows application to be delivered in an isolated environment

4  Aggregates Operating System (OS) resources and the application into a virtualized container

4  Ensures integrity of Operating System (OS) and applications

4  Avoids conflicts between different applications or different versions of the same application

Managing Data Center

Key management activities include

4  Monitoring

                                     Continuous process of gathering information on various elements and services running in a data center

4  Reporting

                                    Details on resource performance, capacity, and utilization

4  Provisioning

                                    Configuration and allocation of resources to meet the capacity, availability, performance, and security requirements

Virtualization and cloud computing have changed the way data center infrastructure resources are provisioned and managed

Data center in Information storage management

Data Center :
                 It is a facility that contains storage, compute, network, and other IT resources to provide centralized data-processing capabilities.

Core elements of a data center

• Application
• Database management system (DBMS)
• Host or Compute
• Network
• Storage

These core elements work together to address data-processing requirements