NTT Limited 21/22 presentation - Communications within CPDs

In the first place, he began by making an introductory reflection in a debate mood on what had been from our perspective the most disruptive technology that had recently entered the market, generating changes in the design model of data centres in these recent years. Ideas such as the cloud, NFGW and even the Internet itself were proposed by the students, but what has been the most decisive tool that has revolutionized this world according to the expert's perception is the virtualization. The main reason he explained is that it allowed to remove most of the hardware dedicated exclusively to a single task, enabling the possibility of taking advantage of the existing infrastructure, offering a vast variety of possibilities to customers. It must be remembered that the data centre ends up being, in most cases, the largest expense of the IT department of companies, therefore, any solution that involves a decrease in these costs arouses great interest within the sector.

According to data offered by the speaker, the 40% of companies currently believe that the solution that will prevail over the others in the data centre environment is the aforementioned "hybridization", which refers to solutions that combine part in the cloud and part on premise. (concept that refers to all the infrastructure that is present at the physical level). What every Next Generation Data Centre model should look like in comparison with those seen in these recent years is: proactivity versus reactivity, fluidity versus being static, automation versus manual, flexibility versus inflexibility, and consolidation versus growth; always adapting it to the needs and requirements according to the type of client (individuals, companies, etc.). Thus, the key points of the biggest challenge that an IT manager will have to face according to Albert's perception are: the consolidation of the minimum number of data centres per company, facilitating their management and reducing the waste they generate as long as communications allow it, virtualization which marks the limits of how far you can go at the level of variety of systems (Windows, Kubernetes, containerization, etc.) and, the most important one, the use of the cloud.

The traditional view of data centres that was exposed to us consists of various switches and switch-routers which enable communications at the wiring level, with special emphasis on the servers that make it up. The latter are linked to both the LAN network, which is through where users access, and the SAN network (Storage Area Network), which is very powerful, especially in large companies and works with different switches through the Fiber Channel protocol which offers more efficiency in comparison to Ethernet in terms of transporting large volumes of data, therefore, the servers must have a minimum of two cards for both worlds (normally they will always have many more). We can also find both NAS (Network Access Storage) environments, which use the Ethernet connections to transport data, and DAS (Direct Attached Storage) environments, which work by connecting a disk array directly to the servers without going through a switch (SATA3, iSCSI, etc.). One of the main characteristics that it has within a traditional data centre is the diversity that it offers in terms of servers, storage, and network in aspects such as: vendors (HP, IBM, Sun, Dell, Fujitsu, etc.), architectures (Tower, Rack, Blade, x86, RISC, cluster, grid, etc.), operating systems (Microsoft, Linux, UNIX, etc.), solutions (DAS, SAN, NAS, iSCSI). Back-up management (especially with the appearance of Ramsomware attacks), the Fiber Channel in the world of “block” applications, iSCSI as the optimal solution for “file” applications (NFS or CFIS), replicas (synchronous and asynchronous) for business continuity or disaster recovery solutions, De-Duplication solutions used by storage environments to store more data in the same space, the appearance of “Flash” memories for data access much faster, the interconnection between data centres and branches through networks and customer access to "islands of applications" also make up essential characteristics when defining this vision of data centres that the expert constantly tried to transmit to us.

The conference ended by exploring in a little more detail some of the previously mentioned concepts such as the operation of NAS storage, SAN storage, the proliferation of server ports and their virtual infrastructure or the different tier 2 and 3 topologies that we can find within the data centres which will undoubtedly help us to better understand the reasons why the evolution of data centres took that direction in each case. Finally, it only remains for the students to thank Albert for the time he spent with us since the exposed concepts will be very useful for the delivery to be made at the end of this course.