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All the necessary information from the DC side to Warren can and should be addressed as a set of simple, unambiguous questions. These questions, in turn, can be divided roughly into three subsets, based on the goal they are meant to achieve. Each subset can be expressed as a more general "umbrella question":
What is the current infra setup, which components it incorporates and what are the plans for the future?
What services are DC offering and what expectations do they have to Warren?
What is the level of commitment of DC in cooperation with Warren and what expectations do they have to Warren?
If these topics are cleared from both sides, the ambiguity and misunderstanding of decisive factors that are the backbone of successful cooperation should be minimized
The first question of the above three is vital to gather the information that affects the following topics in Warren development:
To enhance the analysis result and make it directly usable as an input to development process, let's partition the hypothetical DC stack (hardware, firmware, software) into functional domains that have common properties to according Warren components. Two of DC functional stack domains they have before Warren adoption are more influential than others, both future development- and adoption process-wise to us. These are Network and Storage. They are also tightly coupled, as decisions in one domain heavily depend on properties of the other. If analyzed, the connection between these two domains is expressed best in decision making process, as two fundamental trade-offs:
The biggest trade-off there is in multi-site computing, (thus distributed cash and storage are simultaneously good and evil at the same time ).
This can mostly described as:
There are several factors in DC's network setup that dictates what we need to think through in Warren application development process. Such factors include:
This aspect restricts network traffic between components, servers, racks and between DC and internet. Also it sets DC's physical extendability properties, thus we need to think through how will be handled automated discovery and deployment of new nodes, which components are involved in such process and how the non-positive results of such cases are handled.
Obviously, we cannot fine-tune our setup for every topology type because it's not a standalone factor, so the set of variables in such analysis is large and too costly compared to the business-value of the outcome. But we can target the solution that covers topologies mostly used in target DC's with sufficient degree of quality (metrics of service reliability and availability standards are something that cannot be purely theoretically calculated in platform that is under heavy development and will rather be deduced during DC adoption process). Current assumption is that most widely used topologies in probable target DC group are fat-tree and various forms of clos. Based on that
Although, both, this and next point seem to be trivial compared to a real problem magnets like network topology, adopting SDN solution or better yet, consolidating different SDN solutions; this has become a major issue in public clouds (and presumably also in private ones, where such issues are usually not materialized as a series of scientific papers). As almost all (except for SDN maybe) network-related considerations, also this one has the quantity-dependent nature. The bigger the amounts of data-flow between hardware devices, the bigger of a problem it tend to be.
This traffic (and also In-DC traffic between silos, if larger DC is under consideration), is the one that measures the service system (Warren) efficiency. It's a two-fold problem, first the traffic
Storage is
Based on network and Storage requirements, there can be predicted several issues due to poorly planned location of Warren control plain components such as:
On the other hand, keeping such level of separation between nodes, certainly increases in-DC traffic between racks. So there is no absolute rules in component placement, but rather it depends on already exiting setup, nature of provided services and median/peak traffic levels in racks.
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