Management on Data Center

The network and system management is a very important issue on our data center. We have to detect errors, know where come from, gather the information generated on source, centralize these information, report to technical staff and apply solutions following predefined error patterns.

All of that is important to provide an easy, quick and efficient system log management. In this way, when problems appear, the system centralize the problem description on a single server (with redundancy), which manage these logs and report problems to staff to solve problems quickly, affecting minimally the data center availability.

In an environment like that, it’s very important to have a very efficient management system to solve very quickly the errors and provide a very high availability.

In our management system will have the following elements:

• Log gathering system: we will gather all notifications which generate all devices in our network to a single central server, to manage in an easy and quick way the messages generated. Usual protocols: SNMP, Syslog, ...
• Error detection systems
• Device monitoring systems
• IDS (Intrusion Detection System): Detect security intrusions in our networks analysing traffic and comparing with patterns and known signatures by the system. When detects an attack, it reports to the system.
• Mail server: To have the possibility to report important problems to staff, we need a mail server to go out data center to send e-mails over internet. Usual protocols: POP3, IMAP, ...
• Domain Name Server: It facilitates the management, which permit use names and domains into data center instead of using numerical addresses. These servers provide translation of these domains and names, much more easy to remember, to IP addresses. Main protocol: DNS.

In addition, we will need authentication and privacy on our management system to assure the identity of log generators and provide encryption on messages because attackers won’t read the content.

A main think about management is centralization and unification on a central server. For that we will try to use standardized protocols to gather all information. On the other hand, will be important to appraise the SDN implementation, because its main purpose is to centralize configuration of all network devices, and we can take profit of that to use the same channel to gather and manage all log information on a central server.