BackFuture of the data centre
Ethernet will simply route around failed servers and compute/storage nodes, and the applications continue to run without any interruption
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The “gardener" pulls up to the security door, and is scanned for authentication and authorization. Once he satisfies the security check, the doors open and he drives into a dark cavernous vault where the only illumination comes from blinking red lights scattered throughout the dark forest of towering “trees".
Each red light identifies a dead “fruit" sitting on a “branch". He hears the soft gurgling of liquid that irrigates the forest, quenching the damaging heat as his vehicle is guided down one long row after another. He stops at a tree with a “branch" that is full of dead “fruit". A mechanism rises up from the back of his vehicle and prunes out the dead branch, rotates 180 degrees, and inserts a new “branch", full of fresh “fruit".
When he comes to a branch that has a majority of dead “fruit", he tags it and initiates a transfer of the remaining live “fruits" to surrounding “branches" and “trees" in exchange for their dead “fruit". This transfer should be completed by next week when he makes his scheduled maintenance run to prune the dead “branches".
After he completes his rounds, he exits the vault with a load of dead branches, which he takes to the shredder, to turn into compost to feed new “branches".
What I described may be the data centre of the future where the “gardener" is your new infrastructure administrator. The vault is your lights out data centre and the “forest" is your towering, water cooled, racks of servers, storage and compute/storage nodes, or “fruits", which are packaged in removable drawers or “branches".
While everything in the data centre will be “software defined", there will still be hardware components that fail, and need to be “pruned" and replaced on a regular basis. However, the replacement of failed components will not be as disruptive as it is today, thanks to software defined.
Ethernet will simply route around failed servers and compute/storage nodes, and the applications continue to run without any interruption. Multiple concurrent copies are kept so backup and restore is not required. The failed components can be left in place until the next pruning cycle, when they will be replaced and re-absorbed into the pool of resources.
Erasure coding is used with storage to fail around dead drives or drawers, or racks of drawers without disrupting application access. With erasure coding, no RAID (redundant array of independent discs) rebuild is required. The data on a failed component is recreated onto another good component in the background.
By this time, commodity drives (drives can be hard disk drives or solid state drives) will be used to keep down costs, and the failure rates are expected to be higher than today’s enterprise storage drives. So instead of replacing each drive as it fails, you may decide to leave them in place until all the drives in a drawer are dead and you replace the drives a drawer at a time.
Replacing the drives and rebuilding the drives will be non-disruptive and no backup or restore will be required thanks to software defined. Back in the 1990s there was a group of ex-IBMers who started up a company based on this same concept of “organic" storage, failing in place and pruning out the failures. That company failed because the technology was not there to support it then, but this is all very feasible today.
All these events will be logged at a central site, and components that are pruned will be shredded to ensure privacy.
While I refer to the gardener, as a person it will probably be a robot and the data centre that contains your data will probably be in some hyper-scale, cloud data centre. Check back with me in five years and see how close I am in describing the data centre of the future.
The author is chief technology officer at Hitachi Data Systems Corp.
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