BASIC DATA CENTER DESIGN SOFTWARE

The data center ultimately needs to support software and applications – and therefore software solution architects need to be consulted to drive out both the application architecture and the platform services that are required to support that architecture.Īpplication Platform Services. The applications / end user services rely on underlying application platform support services, and technology standards need to support the business attributes identified by the business processes. The starting point is toĪpplication / End User Services. It is also important to specify the quality attributes in as technology independent manner as possible so that one can properly influence the design. It is at this layer that most of the quality attributes need to be defined. These processes and information processes drive out the major business requirements as well as the cost and risk justifications. The fundamental reason for the creation of a data center is to house process /information for business end users. Techniques such as ATAM are widely used to engage the broader set of architectural stakeholders in these decisions. These considerations will help the architect use reference archiectures and modify them accordingly to meet the needs identified in use scenarios. The architect needs to work quality driven trade-offs against the available options.

The database needs to weight off alternative designs based on how well they meet the cost, risk and quality attribute criteria. The technology landscape has changed so dramatically that even the way quality attributes are implemented has changed considerably when real physical ‘iron’ realizations are compared with ‘cloud services’.įigure 1 illustrates the different elements of data center design and shows that the key quality attributes the often are the most important from a data center design perspective.

BASIC DATA CENTER DESIGN HOW TO

These can be significant investments so proper business cases that examine not only ROI, Rate of Return or other measures of financial ‘feasibility’ of how to provide for basic capabilities need to be analyzed along with a realistic assessment of quality attribute, risk factors in order to make use of the appropriate architectural patterns in the design of the datacenter. The architect needs to understand how to make technology trade-offs based on the business requirements for the data center. Infrastructure Architecture – Infrastructure Building Blocks and Concepts Second Edition (Kindle Location 3607). the availability of an application depends on the availability of the premises, the availability inherent in the infrastructure as well as software considerations). Whole system design is important when one considers that in many cases the quality attributes may be defined around application quality attributes but need to be derived from a consideration of components that impact the overall quality attributes (e.g. The Architect needs to work closely across a variety of disciplines to deal with physical issues such as data center location, and the construction of the premises the overall approach to technology such as traditional mid-range servers, data devices and network or perhaps even multi-tenant cloud configurations needs to be based on realistic scenarios with a careful consideration of costs and risk elements along with quality attributes.

The architect needs to understand the trade-offs between technologies based on overall business objectives. Along with these changes the way that we realize and take into account the quality attributes that define these data centers has also changed, and it will likely continue to evolve. The implementation technology has evolved in several significant leaps that have led to the idea of cloud services and even software defined ‘virtual’ data centers (based on Infrastructure as a service, IaaS). Originally, a data center was a physical location that housed a mainframe. Īlthough at a fundamental level all data centers consist mainly of three functional capabilities: processing, storage, and connectivity (networks) the technologies have evolved considerably since the early days. Ultimately data centers need to support the applications that the business uses. “Data Centers house critical computing resources in controlled environments and under centralized management, which enable enterprises to operate around the clock or according to their business needs”.

Basic data center design