What is a data center?
With the continuous development of industrial digital transformation, data becomes a key production factor, and data center shoulders the heavy responsibility of computing, storing and forwarding data, and is the most critical digital infrastructure in the new infrastructure. Modern data centers mainly include the following core components.
Computing system, including general-purpose computing modules for deploying business and high-performance computing modules for providing super computing power, etc.
Storage systems, including mass storage modules, data management engines, storage private networks, etc.
Energy system, including power supply module, temperature control module, IT management module, etc.
Data center network, which is responsible for linking general-purpose computing, high-performance computing and storage modules inside the data center, and all data interactions between them are realized through the data center network.
Among them, it is the general-purpose computing module that directly undertakes the user's business, and the physical basic unit it relies on is a large number of servers. If the server is the body of the data center, then the data center network is the soul of the data center.
Why do we need data center interconnection?
At present, data center construction is common in various organizations and enterprises, but it is difficult for a single data center to adapt to the business needs of the new era, and there is an urgent need for multi-data center interconnection. This is mainly reflected in the following aspects.
Rapid growth of business scale
Currently, emerging businesses such as cloud computing and intelligence are developing rapidly, and the number of related applications is also increasing rapidly, and these applications are strongly dependent on data centers. Therefore, the scale of business undertaken by data centers is growing rapidly, and the resources of individual data centers will soon be insufficient. Restricted by factors such as the area occupied by data center construction and energy supply, a single data center cannot be expanded indefinitely, and when the business scale grows to a certain extent, multiple data centers need to be built in the same city or off-site. At this time, multiple data centers need to be interconnected to collaborate with each other to complete the business support.
In addition, in the context of economic digital transformation, in order to achieve common business success, enterprises within the same industry and between different industries need to frequently share and cooperate at the data level, which also requires interconnection and interoperability between data centers of different enterprises.
Cross-geographic user access is becoming increasingly common
In recent years, the business of data centers has changed from being centered on Web services to cloud services and data services, and the scope of users of related organizations and enterprises has long been unrestricted by geography. Especially in the case of very popular mobile Internet, users expect to enjoy high-quality services anytime and anywhere. In order to meet these demands and further enhance user experience, enterprises with the conditions usually build multiple data centers in different geographic areas to facilitate cross-territory user access in close proximity. This requires business deployment across data centers, and needs to support multi-data center interconnection.
