Thinking about Data Center Solutions

Engineers from La Salle-URL share the latest news and projects in the field of network solutions in telematic engineering.

11 April 2016 | Posted by Redacción Data Center

Managing a Data Center

Hey folks, how you doing?

In today's post we will be talking about how to manage a Data Center.

Since we started this blog, we have been talking about many different topics and many different protocols that get involved in the structure of a data center. There are so many things that are important and we should not skip a bit of them... But how to get rid of all of the details without missing anything?

There are many ways to control your data center, and here we will analize the ones we think that are the best:

  1. Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) 

This protocol is responsible for gathering and organizing information about managed devices on IP networks and for modifying that information to change device behavior. SNMP is widely used to monitor network-attached devices for conditions that need administrative attention. SNMP exposes management data in the form of variables on the managed systems, which describe the system configuration. These variables can then be queried by managing applications.

  • Managers: nodes which function is to oversee the behavior of another node on the network.
  • Agent: software that is run in the managed device.
  • Network Management Station (NMS): execute applications that monitor and control managed devices. NMS provide the bulk of the processing and memory resources required for network management.

SNMP_jeeP

2. Netflow

NetFlow is a feature that was introduced on Cisco routers that provides the ability to collect IP network traffic as it enters or exits an interface. By analyzing the data provided by NetFlow, a network administrator can determine things such as the source and destination of traffic, class of service, and the causes of congestion. A typical flow monitoring setup (using NetFlow) consists of three main components.

  • Flow exporter: aggregates packets into flows and exports flow records towards one or more flow collectors.
  • Flow collector: responsible for reception, storage and pre-processing of flow data received from a flow exporter.
  • Analysis application: analyzes received flow data in the context of intrusion detection or traffic profiling, for example.

NetFlow_jeeP

3. API Swapping

Due to the fact that each vendor has its own protocol, another solution is to create a management application that is knowledgeable of more than one private interface or protocol. However, creating such an application requires vendors to share information about their interfaces. Such sharing is called API swapping. Unfortunately, API swapping does not scale business-wise or engineering-wise. First, the two competitors must negotiate a mutually beneficial business arrangement. Next, the two competitors must integrate the new technology into each other's management applications. This time-intensive process must be repeated for each new device to be supported from a new vendor. Additionally, even after the initial integration, continual updates are required for each individual product release.

Those three solutions explained above are the one that we consider the most valuable in managing a network, and therefore, a data center. Hope you have enjoyed it!

See you in the next post.

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