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The general tendency is towards a concept “software-defined DC”, largely because of automation and management benefits it offers. The exception to tendency is bare-metal provisioning popularity that could be explained the still-existing demand for direct control over hardware, required some type of applications, independence from general software-system failures and speed.

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Considerations in the network domain

There are several factors in DCs network setup that dictates what we need to think through in the Warren application development process. Such factors include:

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To conclude the above, there shouldn’t arise any drastic problems on a connection basis (which doesn't mean it's a trivial task!). However, there is an exception to that hypothetical balance - the security domain. All SDN systems implement some (or more) security domains, whether it’s client level or system-wide. To configure 2 or more SDN systems to cooperate simultaneously on that domain, might be more time consuming than configure the whole system to use adopt a new one.

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Considerations in storage domain

Warren storage domain consists of three options:

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To determine the right solution, one must consider several factors that are required to implement a particular storage type. As storage holds the most valuable part - client data, the impact on the reliability and to QoS. Afterall - network outage only affects the availability of data, whereas storage problems may lead to permanent data loss.

Distributed - Expensive, but reliable, multi-functional, and extendable

The cost of a distributed storage (that may also be shared-distributed) comes from the fact that distributed is usually (not always - one exception is HCI) implemented as a separated cluster(s). So there are three main types of costs and an additional, optional one:

• Upfront cost - devices itself, including explicit network for storage (fixed cost)

• Repair/management costs + cost of space (fixed over a long period of time)

• Energy cost (usually fixed over a long period of time with its seasonal spikes)

• Optional license cost when the commercial distributed storage system is applied

When added together and divided into monthly payments over a time period that equals server units service life, by far, the highest one is the energy cost. To conclude, although it seems wiser to make use of old server hardware for storage clusters, it is actually not so at all. Much wiser is to buy new, specially configured, low power consumption hardware that may even come. Such specially configured devices offer another benefit - fast cluster extendability.

In a typical distributed storage solution, there are implemented both object and block storage, giving in such a way an opportunity to (when implemented as separate clusters) to use object storage also as a backup or disaster recovery storage, in addition to its main purpose.

The reliability advantage compared to shared or local storage should be obvious.

Warren components placement in DC

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