Final resolution of the project

Hi fellows! After this long journey through the world of the data centers, we thought that it was necessary to do a summary post, not to explain everything we did again, but to explain which are the steps that we followed to solve the challenges that we faced during the development of our data center.

The first that we did, was determining which are the needs that we want to cover in our project; and in fact, you have to be aware that there is going to be hundreds of factors to consider, and if you don’t have a large team it’s better to concentrate your efforts on the most relevant ones. Again, in our particular case, to choose the more relevant factors what we did was attending to several seminars of trends and technics in data centers, so we could learn from the hand of professionals of the sector which are the best points to focus our efforts in.

From this professionals we could knew about this new trends, but to write up this large posts we had to do intense researches, we did this by multiple methods, from googling until contacting with professionals; and of course we took references from existing data centers and how did they solved the same problems that we faced. During the development of the project, we had to accomplish a list of requirements related with the security and technical features of the data center we were designing; to do so we checked in detail the datasheets of all the products we have selected (especially in order to see details related with the speed, number of ports, type of connections, and others) and we made some software choices to approximate our solution to the requested solution as much as possible. Finally these requirements were of great help to establish margins of work in our project and focus our work in a specific solution, it’s very important to consider these requirements all the time, because this will model your network, and can ease your job very much.

After (and sometimes, while) we decided which the points we wanted to develop were and the technical details of every part we want to develop, we proceeded to choose how to do a proper interconnection of this blocks. During this third step many details such as the QoS, the security and the network protocols were chosen.

The interconnection of the designed blocks, it’s very important because will decide the capabilities of the network that we are developing, also the network topology and link properties will be specified in this step; this is because we could choose some topology before, but we couldn’t really set the details of it until we have already decided how do we want every block to be.

At this point, we have done the steps of:

1. Determining the needs from our data center network
2. Develop the blocks according to the requirements
3. Interconnecting the blocks

And there is this last step to do:

4. Condition the facilities to host a data center

This last step it’s important in order to maintain the previous job you have been doing. If your facilities are not prepared to host a data center, this is going to fail sooner or later. We learned much of the things we had explained you by assisting to conferences and visiting real data centers.