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Data Center 3.0 - Unified Information Infrastructure

The Management challenges, Eco-Consciousness and Escalating costs are driving the Technology providers to move from discrete solutions for Compute, Storage and networking to Unified Information Infrastructure.

The Unified Information Infrastructure as a framework builds on Unified Compute, Unified Network, and Unified Storage. There is a need to incorporate the management and security services to complete the Data Center 3.0 requirements.

The Advancements in network technologies and Standards (10 G Ethernet, FCoE, IPMI etc) are fuelling the Vision of a Unified Network. It is practical to unify the management traffic, inter-process (cluster)-communication- IPC, Storage area network (SAN) and Local area network-LAN traffic onto a single unified fabric. Some solutions are driving this to the realm of reality today.

With the advent of in Blade server technology and Virtualization at the access network layer for these solutions, there is a clear shift toward Unifieds Compute. Unified Compute consists of Servers, first level i/o virtualization for IPC, LAN and SAN along with a integrated management stack
Unified Storage is emerging from just providing LUN’s and dedicated Front end ports to providing Virtual Storage contexts (Netapp vFilers), Storage gateways( for front-ending desperate storage solutions) and Software storage arrays spanning across virtualized platforms.

There is a unification of NAS, SAN and Backup (Virtual Tape) Devices at Storage controller and Storage network level.



This is a logical framework for management of physical devices and advanced data center support services along with a set of key considerations that one has to be aware of in making informed choices in during various stages of maturity of the Unified Information Infrastructure.

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