Chapter 2
Data Center Environment
Key Concepts
Today, data centers are essential and integral parts of any business, whether small, medium, or large in size. The core elements of a data center are host, storage, connectivity (or network), applications, and DBMS that are managed centrally. These elements work together to process and store data. With the evolution of virtualization, data centers have also evolved from a classic data center to a virtualized data center (VDC). In a VDC, physical resources from a classic data center are pooled together and provided as virtual resources. This abstraction hides the complexity and limitation of physical resources from the user. By consolidating IT resources using virtualization, organizations can optimize their infrastructure utilization and reduce the total cost of owning an infrastructure. Moreover, in a VDC, virtual resources are created using software that enables faster deployment, compared to deploying physical resources in classic data centers. This chapter covers all the key components of a data center, including virtualization at compute, memory, desktop, and application. Storage and network virtualization is discussed later in the book.
With the increase in the criticality of information ...
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