The owner of the data center is providing a secure building with
reliable power, air conditioning and access to multiple ISP's. Some
businesses have strong preferences regarding which ISP's they wish to
carry their traffic, hence the more options the data center provides
then the more competitive they are. Service reliability is also very
important to the server users so back-up power and failsafe connectivity
are important features.
In many instances the amount of traffic an ISP carries into or
out of the data center is contracted for at scalable rates. The more
traffic then the higher the price. Traffic volume is also a contracted
item between the hosting company and the data center. Hence there is a
margin available to the data center owner if the owner can balance the
traffic across the available ISPs to best effect.
If a failure should occur in any of the data center equipment,
this can cause an imbalance in traffic to the ISPs and unacceptable
service quality for delay sensitive traffic such as media streaming or
VoIP traffic. Any problems in the ISP network between the data center
and the other end of the connection can be avoided if intelligence
resides in the data center that picks the best ISP performance at any
given time for any given service type.
CertusNet's product addresses the needs of the data center owner
by performing the following functions:
Failure Recovery
Any failure in the data center network will be resolved by the
CertusNet product dynamically redirecting traffic without prescriptive
instructions or manual intervention. The traffic is restored with regard
to all traffic loads in the data center network so all links are
balanced and no cascading overloads or oscillations of traffic occur.
Cost/Performance Optimization
The CertusNet product continually monitors the volume of traffic
flowing to each ISP plus the end-to-end performance of each ISP. Then,
based on pre-selected choices made by the administrator, outgoing
traffic will be sent via the ISP meeting the performance needs of the
traffic at the lowest cost. The CertusNet product allows for these
choices to vary depending on traffic type.
The Hosting Company Business
The hosting companies provide storage for their client's data. It
may be static data such as files that are rarely accessed or it could be
very dynamic data such as email messages or real time financial
transactions. This business is expanding rapidly as e-commerce grows and
the new generation of web users (teenagers) meets, socialize and
exchange music, photos and videos through the Internet. What makes the
growth more startling is that storage is now virtually free, so these
users never throw anything away and server farms are growing fast.
The new generation of data centers is becoming known as mega data
centers where the owner (Google, Yahoo, MSN etc) is both the hosting
company and the data center owner. These mega data centers are planned
to host one million servers and will require a 200-megawatt power
source.
No matter what the size of the data center, the hosting servers
must be accessible at all times. The whole structure of the data center
only exists to allow access to the servers to either deposit data or
retrieve data. The question of accessibility and reliability has been
addressed above. However, for the hosting company there is a growing
issue with the cost of power. A mega data center requiring 200mW of
power will pay $240,000 per day for power if it is 5 cents per kWh. This
adds up to $87.6M per year.
CertusNet can help address the power issue by performing the
following function:
Server Virtualization
The introduction of server virtualization (or Virtual Machines - VM)
by hosting companies is to achieve high scalability, availability
and performance improvements. VM technology can combine multiple
workloads of several servers onto one server.
Consolidating the servers or moving server workload from one
machine to another using virtual machines causes changes in the traffic
pattern across the data center network. This requires the network to be
dynamically and automatically configured and balanced to adapt to the
new traffic pattern. To reconfigure the network and balance the traffic
manually is just not possible in these situations. Unfortunately, there
is no dynamic-network-level-balancing solution available in the market
today for this purpose. The benefits of virtualization to efficiently
utilize server resources and save power consumption are severely limited
without dynamic traffic management and the possibility of only using a
small percentage of servers at night operating in VM mode to handle the
reduced demand is severely curtailed
CertusNet's product can automatically manage the pattern changes
of network traffic onto Virtual Machines during the 8 hours when only
10% need to be powered. This could result in savings of $72,000 per day
or $26M per year. All this is done dynamically with no human
intervention.
