The demand for data center colocation services is on the rise, with the industry estimating an increase of 13.35% in 2022. Colocation services are often less expensive than maintaining an on-site data center, allowing you to redirect resources to more exciting and lucrative technology initiatives. However, remote infrastructure can be more challenging to monitor, secure, and troubleshoot. Plus, if you’re not careful, usage-based pricing could cause your budget to spiral out of control. Here’s what to know about the potential challenges and the best practices to implement to avoid common pitfalls.

Data center colocation services: Challenges and solutions

Challenge 1: Visibility

One way that data center colocation services differ from on-premises data centers is that there is often less physical access to and visibility over the infrastructure. Administrators can’t pop in every day to check environmental conditions like temperature and humidity or to verify that nobody has opened the cage without permission or physically tampered with the equipment. This can make it challenging to maintain optimal conditions to extend the life of your equipment and prevent catastrophic failure.

In addition, colocation facilities also follow the shared responsibility model, which means they’re responsible for a certain portion of security, and you’re responsible for the rest. The facility usually has security cameras, electronic door locks, and other security measures in place, but you generally won’t have access to the videos or logs as a customer. That means you need to ensure that you make up the difference with comprehensive monitoring solutions so there are no gaps in your coverage.

Solution 1: Environmental and infrastructure monitoring

Environmental monitoring sensors collect data on conditions in the data center, providing administrators with a virtual presence in remote colocation facilities. The sensors connect to the I/O ports of console servers and other infrastructure management systems, allowing administrators to monitor things like temperature, humidity, and air quality. Often, these systems use pre-set baselines and will trigger automatic alerts when conditions exceed safe levels, making it easier to efficiently monitor remote infrastructure.

Some environmental monitoring systems also include physical tampering sensors, which will alert administrators if someone opens the door to your cage or comes in close proximity to your equipment without prior authorization. This helps to supplement the physical security provided by colocation services and gives you more control over your remote infrastructure.

Challenge 2: Compliance with data privacy regulations

When the infrastructure used to store and process data is no longer managed on-site by in-house staff, it gets much more difficult to stay compliant with strict data privacy regulations. For example, if your organization processes HIPAA data, you need to know exactly who has access to that data, what specific data they access, and why they need access. That also includes access to the infrastructure that stores and processes the data.

If that infrastructure is housed and managed by a third party, as is the case with data center colocation, you need stricter privacy and security controls to maintain compliance.

Solution 2: Zero trust security

The zero trust security methodology is based on the principle of “never trust, always verify.” In the zero trust model, you microsegment your network to facilitate the creation of highly precise security policies and controls. This allows you to control exactly who has access to which resources in your colocation facility.

In addition, the zero trust methodology recommends identity and access management (IAM) solutions with two-factor authentication (2FA) and user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA). These solutions force an account to re-verify its identity and re-establish trust before it can move to different microsegments and access other resources. This both aids in data privacy compliance and limits the lateral movement of compromised accounts, improving the overall security of your remote infrastructure.

Challenge 3: Around-the-clock access to remote infrastructure

Colocation data center infrastructure is managed remotely over the WAN, which requires an internet connection. When administrators manage that infrastructure on the same production network used for data traffic, it’s known as in-band management.

The issue with in-band management is that it relies on the same LAN architecture that’s used in production. That means a misconfiguration or hardware failure that takes the LAN offline will also cut off all management access, making remote troubleshooting impossible. The same issue occurs if there’s a WAN failure or ISP outage.

If administrators can’t troubleshoot and recover the infrastructure remotely, you will need to dispatch a truck roll, which is both expensive and time-consuming. And, the longer that infrastructure is offline, the higher your downtime costs, including lost business and reputation damage.

Solution 3: Out-of-band (OOB) management

Out-of-band (OOB) management uses serial consoles with secondary WAN interfaces to provide an alternative path to remote infrastructure. OOB serial consoles create a dedicated management network that’s separate from the production LAN. This gives you the ability to perform resource-intensive orchestration workflows without negatively impacting production performance.

OOB management also allows administrators to remotely troubleshoot device failures, LAN misconfigurations, and other sources of outages. This reduces your reliance on truck rolls and helps you recover from outages quicker, so you can lower your costs and protect your reputation.

Challenge 4: Colocation bills

The cost of data center colocation services is generally dependent on your power and bandwidth usage as well as the amount of space your equipment takes up. If not managed properly, usage-based pricing can cause your monthly bill to vary dramatically, wreaking havoc on your budget. Many factors lead to usage spikes, such as sudden surges in demand and inefficient power distribution.

Plus, as your business grows and your technology requirements evolve, you may need to scale up the number of devices in your rack. And as you add more computing, storage, and server resources, you also need more management devices (e.g., serial consoles), all of which take up valuable real estate in the data center.

Solution 4: DCIM orchestration, SDN, and all-in-one devices

This particular challenge has multiple solutions, any or all of which can help keep costs in check while enabling easier scaling.

Data center infrastructure management (DCIM) solutions provide a centralized platform from which to monitor and control remote infrastructure. DCIM tools give administrators the ability to monitor power flows and redistribute loads on demand for more efficient power usage. Modern DCIM orchestration solutions also include automation capabilities for optimal power load balancing.

Software-defined networking (SDN) creates a virtual overlay network, dedicated to management and orchestration, that sits on top of the network architecture. This facilitates the use of sophisticated network automation workflows such as intelligent routing, which can automatically redirect traffic to alternative resources when the bandwidth load on your colocation infrastructure is too high. SDN can help you stay within bandwidth usage thresholds at your colocation data center(s), so you can use your services more cost-effectively.

Finally, all-in-one networking devices can help you reduce the number of boxes in your rack, so you use less square footage in the data center. For example, a device like the Nodegrid Serial Console Plus provides out-of-band management access, routing, switching, and network failover in a single box. Plus, it includes 96 managed serial ports in a single 1U rack-mount form factor, reducing the number of management devices required to control large-scale data center deployments.

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Large digital service providers face some unique data center and network management challenges. Customers and shareholders expect 24/7, high-speed access to these services from anywhere in the world. The scale and complexity of their infrastructure, combined with their highly distributed, global network architectures, can make it difficult for administrators to meet those expectations. In this article, we’ll discuss how data center orchestration with Gen 3 out-of-band (OOB) management helps digital service providers achieve the reliability their customers demand while reducing expenses and complexity.

Use case: Data center orchestration with Gen 3 out-of-band for digital service providers

The businesses in this use case provide digital services at a very large scale. They need to ensure constant availability and reliability because that’s what their customers expect, and it’s what their competitors promise. Some examples of large digital service providers include:

★    Music or video streaming services
★    Stock trading applications
★    Online banking portals
★    Cloud compute services
★    SASE and SSE vendors
★    Internet service providers (ISPs) and telecom companies
★    Internet exchanges
★    Storage as a Service providers

These companies typically host their resources in private data centers or colocation facilities, so they have total control over the hardware and infrastructure. Because of the extremely large scale of their operations, they need to deploy, maintain, and administer many machines. And, since they typically provide global services, they have a large, complex, and highly-distributed network architecture.

There are several major pain points for network administrators in this environment. First, they need to maintain constant access to remote infrastructure, even during network outages. Second, they need the ability to scale up their infrastructure on-demand by quickly deploying new machines with the correct configurations. Finally, they need to be able to monitor, manage, and optimize their complex network architectures.

Let’s look at how these pain points are solved using data center orchestration with Gen 3 OOB.

1. Constant availability

People expect 100% uptime from their digital services, which is why it’s always major news when a big provider like Netflix goes down. To try and achieve constant availability, these vendors typically use their own hardware in private data centers and colocation facilities rather than relying on public cloud hosting. They host their infrastructure in many different facilities around the world, both for redundancy and to ensure peak performance for globally distributed customers.

Between hiring freezes and staff cuts at major companies like Apple, Google, and Netflix, many of these companies don’t have enough technical staff to maintain a physical presence in all of these data centers. Instead, their administrators and engineers access this infrastructure remotely, using tools like serial consoles, KVM switches, and jump boxes to connect to devices in the rack. However, if they lose network access to the management device due to an ISP outage, hardware failure, or configuration mistake, they’re left without a way to remotely recover. That means they need to either dispatch a technician from their home office or pay for costly on-site managed services from their hosting facility. Either way, valuable time and money are wasted on travel and other logistics.

Out-of-band management solves this problem by providing an alternative path to remote network infrastructure. Data center orchestration solutions with Gen 3 OOB use a secondary network connection (typically a cellular modem) that is dedicated to management and troubleshooting. That means administrators can configure, troubleshoot, and orchestrate remote infrastructure even when the primary network connection is offline or overloaded with production traffic. This gives digital service providers the ability to recover from outages and other issues much faster, bringing them closer to their goal of 24/7 availability.

2. Scalability

Large digital service providers need to serve millions of customers who may live all over the globe. They also need to meet sudden spikes in demand without limiting the performance of their product. That means they need to deploy lots of machines to many different facilities, often very quickly. Plus, they need to do so without configuration mistakes, as these could delay deployment, create security vulnerabilities, or even require a truck-roll to fix.

Since deployments need to happen quickly, accurately, and repeatedly, that makes them a prime candidate for automation. There are two primary technologies used to automate data center deployments: zero touch provisioning (ZTP) and Infrastructure as Code (IaC). A Gen 3 OOB data center orchestration tool enables both.

Zero touch provisioning gives administrators the ability to deploy device configurations to remote hardware over a network connection. Earlier generations of OOB data center solutions often included ZTP for devices within a specific vendor’s ecosystem, but Gen 3 tools are vendor-agnostic. That means administrators can remotely deploy an entire data center of mixed-vendor solutions without risking security breaches and the potential for opening a backdoor through pre-staging or on-site configuration. Plus, Gen 3 OOB provides a dedicated network to use in the provisioning process, so if there’s an issue with the configuration that takes the new device offline, administrators can still remotely recover.

IaC decouples a device’s configuration from the underlying hardware, turning it into software code that’s executed according to programmatic playbooks. Gen 3 OOB data center orchestration solutions support automation through IaC, either by integrating with third-party IaC platforms or by directly hosting playbooks. This allows administrators to apply DevOps best practices to infrastructure configurations, for example running automated tests to verify the quality and security of the code before deployment. IaC also reduces the time and complexity involved in configuring new devices, because scripts are easily reusable and can be deployed as many times as needed.

Through automation technologies like ZTP and IaC, Gen 3 OOB data center orchestration platforms allow digital service providers to scale their infrastructure quickly and efficiently. Automation also reduces the risk of human error, which reduces the chances that rapid scaling will cause service interruptions.

3. Network complexity

Large digital service providers have complex and distributed network architectures. They may have dozens or even hundreds of remote sites connected to the WAN, each of which may have different vendor hardware, bandwidth requirements, and security risks. Plus, there are many thousands of users accessing those resources from all over the world. In this kind of environment, manual network management is too time-consuming and prone to error.

Once again, automation is key to overcoming this challenge. Network automation is enabled in much the same way as infrastructure automation—by implementing software abstraction to decouple the management plane from the underlying hardware. This is known as software-defined networking (SDN) or, in the case of WAN architectures, software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN). Digital service providers use SD-WAN to virtualize their distributed networks, employing software network controllers and APIs to route and load-balance traffic.

The right data center orchestration solution centralizes management of the entire SD-WAN architecture, giving administrators a single pane of glass from which to monitor and control the virtual network. Gen 3 OOB platforms are vendor-neutral, which means they can dig their hooks into all of the various hardware and software solutions that make up an SD-WAN infrastructure. They enable end-to-end automation of network management workflows and provide orchestration capabilities to automate the deployment and execution of those automated workflows. This makes it possible for digital service providers to manage their highly complex network architectures efficiently while maintaining optimal performance.

Gen 3 OOB data center orchestration with Nodegrid

The need for constant availability, easy scalability, and efficient network management is what brings many major digital service providers to ZPE Systems. The Nodegrid data center orchestration platform is the first Gen 3 out-of-band solution that enables end-to-end automation and complete vendor freedom.

The Nodegrid Serial Console Plus (NSCP) is a high-density serial console for large-scale and hyperscale data centers and includes features such as 5G/4G LTE cellular OOB and network failover to ensure 24/7 remote access. Built on the open, Linux-based Nodegrid OS, the NSCP supports integrations with your choice of third-party solutions, or you can directly host your automation, security, and SD-WAN applications on the device itself. Plus, the ZPE Cloud management software provides a centralized, web-based orchestration platform from which to deploy, monitor, and control your entire network architecture.

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