It’s important for companies to analyze their requirements and carefully consider the advantages and disadvantages of each method before choosing a path forward.Â
Best practices for data center scalability
The following tips can help organizations ensure their data center infrastructure is flexible enough to support scaling by any of the above methods.
Run workloads on vendor-neutral platforms
Vendor lock-in, or a lack of interoperability with third-party solutions, can severely limit data center scalability. Using vendor-neutral platforms ensures that teams can add, expand, or integrate data center resources and capabilities regardless of provider. These platforms make it easier to adopt new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) while ensuring compatibility with legacy systems.
Use infrastructure automation and AIOps
Infrastructure automation technologies help teams provision and deploy data center resources quickly so companies can scale up or out with greater efficiency. They also ensure administrators can effectively manage and secure data center infrastructure as it grows in size and complexity.Â
For example, zero-touch provisioning (ZTP) automatically configures new devices as soon as they connect to the network, allowing remote teams to deploy new data center resources without on-site visits. Automated configuration management solutions like Ansible and Chef ensure that virtualized system configurations stay consistent and up-to-date while preventing unauthorized changes. AIOps (artificial intelligence for IT operations) uses machine learning algorithms to detect threats and other problems, remediate simple issues, and provide root-cause analysis (RCA) and other post-incident forensics with greater accuracy than traditional automation.Â
Isolate the control plane with Gen 3 serial consoles
Serial consoles are devices that allow administrators to remotely manage data center infrastructure without needing to log in to each piece of equipment individually. They use out-of-band (OOB) management to separate the data plane (where production workflows occur) from the control plane (where management workflows occur). OOB serial console technology – especially the third-generation (or Gen 3) – aids data center scalability in several ways:
- Gen 3 serial consoles are vendor-neutral and provide a single software platform for administrators to manage all data center devices, significantly reducing management complexity as infrastructure scales out.
- Gen 3 OOB can extend automation capabilities like ZTP to mixed-vendor and legacy devices that wouldn’t otherwise support them.
- OOB management moves resource-intensive infrastructure automation workflows off the data plane, improving the performance of production applications and workflows.
- Serial consoles move the management interfaces for data center infrastructure to an isolated control plane, which prevents malware and cybercriminals from accessing them if the production network is breached. Isolated management infrastructure (IMI) is a security best practice for data center architectures of any size.
How Nodegrid simplifies data center scalability
Nodegrid is a Gen 3 out-of-band management solution that streamlines vertical and horizontal data center scalability.Â
The Nodegrid Serial Console Plus (NSCP) offers 96 managed ports in a 1RU rack-mounted form factor, reducing the number of OOB devices needed to control large-scale data center infrastructure. Its open, x86 Linux-based OS can run VMs, VNFs, and Docker containers so teams can run virtualized workloads without deploying additional hardware. Nodegrid can also run automation, AIOps, and security on the same platform to further reduce hardware overhead.
Nodegrid OOB is also available in a modular form factor. The Net Services Router (NSR) allows teams to add or swap modules for additional compute, storage, memory, or serial ports as the data center scales up or down.
