Data Center Orchestration Overview
Data Center Orchestration is a process driven workflow that helps make data centers function efficiently. This helps to reduce repetitive, slow and error prone manual tasks. Data center Orchestration software uses automation to implement various software or network services. For instance deploying servers or even allocating clients or end users to a particular Service provider. Orchestration allows each software defined application to come together to render a particular service. It organizes all the tasks and creates a highly responsive data center to cater for these services. By orchestrating data centers we make it easier for consumers to access effective service delivery.
Data Center orchestration systems are frameworks for managing data being exchanged between business services and applications that manage them.
Data Centers have three main categories, let’s discuss them below;
Private Single Tenant: This describes individual organizations that maintain their own data centers. These data centers are meant for private use and it has only one organization or tenant using it.
Private Multitenant: These data centers are built and maintained by the organization. These include organizations that provide specialized data center services on behalf of other client organizations. IBM and EDS are good examples of such data centers.
Public Multitenant: These organizations provide generalized data center services on behalf of other client organizations. Examples are Google and Amazon. These data centers offer their services to the public, and anybody who wishes to use them has to access them throughout the world wide web.
Function of Data Centre Orchestration systems.
- To Streamline the provisioning of Public and private owned resource
- Reduction in the time an infrastructure uses to determine if it can meet a business need.
- Reduction of deployment time for IT departments
- Data Orchestration helps to schedule and coordinate various services
- Data orchestration uses a distributed data repository to manage large data sets.
- Policy enforcement and provision of alerts for corrupted data.
- Data orchestration helps integrate data service with services rendered on the cloud.
Data Center Orchestration Tools
The following are a few examples of some data center orchestration tools;
- Ansible
This is an agentless configuration management tool. It was created to push changes and reconfigure newly deployed machines. This platform supports the writing of custom apps. This platform is written in python and allows users to script their commands in YAML.
- Chef
Chef uses a client server architecture based on rugby. It presents its infrastructure as code.
- Docker
Docker has isolated containers that allow execution of many application on one server
- Puppet
This platform is built with Rugby and has a primary architecture. It was created to automate tasks for system administrators.
- Vagrant
Vagrant helps a user build, manage and set configurations in a lightweight virtual machine environment. Vagrant allows every member in an Information technology team to possess an identical development environment.
Orchestration Challenges in Data Centers
Considering the numerous advantages datacenters have in a software defined network, data centres also have a few limitations and hindrances. Below I will be discussing three major challenges and dwell a bit into the solutions;
- Infrastructure monitoring and visibility
- Large sizes in Data Center networks
- Diversity of Application Workloads
- Conflict in Service Objectives of Data center users.
- Data Center Infrastructure management Solution.
- Data Center Network Security
- Performance and Reliability of Data Centers.
References
What is Data Orchestration & Why It’s Essential for Analysis. (n.d.). Segment. https://segment.com/resources/data-strategy/what-is-data-orchestration/#integration-challenges%C2%A0
Efficient orchestration of data centres via comprehensive and application-aware trade-off exploration. (n.d.). CORE Reader. https://core.ac.uk/reader/81223380
Software Defined Networks-A comprehensive approach:
Paul-Goransson:Chuck-Black-Timothy-Culver{ Morgan-Kaufmann-2016}
What is Data Center Orchestration? Definition & FAQs | Avi Networks. (2023, August 25). Avi Networks. https://avinetworks.com/glossary/data-center-orchestration