Software Technology is a widely used data center

Software Technology is a widely used data center

"Thirty Years of Hedong, Thirty Years of Hexi", a world giant that once started as a hardware company, is now in a painful transformation. The integration and standardization of hardware technologies are becoming more and more obvious, with less space available. Now let's look at the PC and mobile phone industries. Even a small factory in Shenzhen and Dongguan can make a wide range of mobile phones and PCs, because mobile phones or PC components can be purchased everywhere, you can simply assemble the components directly. These hardware components have formed a unified standard and are provided on demand according to the specifications. Once such a ethos is formed, homogeneous competition is very serious, leading to accelerated decline in profits. Finally, there is no development prospect for this industry. Although the data center has been booming over the past few years, it has actually become an old industry. It has been around for decades. It has only been mentioned in terms of data centers in recent years. Tens of thousands of hardware devices are gathered in the data center. Almost every giant company in the world can see their products here. No one can give up the data center market easily, however, with the fierce hardware competition and different enterprises offering differentiated products, the profits of the entire industry will continue to decline without making any changes, and the PC and mobile phone industry will soon follow suit, this is what many enterprises and individuals do not want to see. So people put their eyes on the software. To provide differentiated competition, only the software can achieve it. To obtain higher profits, only the software can achieve it. For a time, software-defined networks, software-defined storage, software-defined data centers, and so on, all kinds of software technologies on the data center are flushed. hardware enterprises are desperately trying to make transformations based on their own hardware advantages, promote Software Technologies in the data center and introduce the features and functions of various software technologies to the data center. Software giants, especially Internet giants, such as Google, Microsoft, and Oracle, have also made great contributions to the data center field by leveraging their software technology advantages, it is intended to completely destroy the leader of hardware in the data center. At this time, if there were no software or cloud products in the data center, it would seem a little outdated, and the software technology in the data center had become a breeze.

Compared with hardware, the software is more flexible, and can provide customized products, making it easier to achieve more functions through software control. However, software relies on computing servers. In the early days, the computing speed of servers was not high, but the computing speed of hardware was much higher. Therefore, hardware was greatly developed. Now, the computing power of servers is getting stronger and stronger, and it is easy and effort-free to run large software. This provides an opportunity for the development of software, so that the software can no longer consider the computing performance, you only need to focus on designing software algorithms. Introduce software into the data center so that virtual machines, virtual networks, and storage devices can be allocated and reconfigured in a high-speed and automatic manner without being limited by non-dynamic hardware infrastructure, this will bring a new operation mode to the data center. In the past, hardware dominated the operation of the data center. Now, the software takes the lead and uses hardware as the infrastructure to complete the operation of the data center through software deployed on its upper layer, the application business of the data center no longer needs to care about the underlying hardware, but the basic software running on the hardware. The transformation of this technology development idea has brought a huge change to the data center, from servers to networks, from storage to security, software has penetrated into every aspect of the data center and is omnipotent. There is nothing unexpected and no software can do. Once you think about the problem from the software perspective, everything becomes very simple. This is like writing some interface software, we can design the interface in a variety of ways, as long as we master the software design rules can be achieved, everything according to our own will to achieve, this is also true for the data center. Design and control all aspects of the entire data center through software, and use the programmable features of the software to meet many application business needs.

Highlighting the role of software in the data center is essentially separating the control of various devices from the data forwarding channel. The software controls the data forwarding and processing of hardware devices. In fact, it is still implemented by the hardware. The software controls and manages the data. For example, for network devices, the learning and aging mechanisms of network device forwarding items are transferred to the unified software, which is managed and issued by the software in a unified manner. This is SDN technology, that is, Software Defined network. In this way, you only need to install SDN Controller Software on several servers to connect the Controller with various network devices. Then, you can use the controller software to build hundreds of controllers, even thousands of network devices are controlled and managed. In this way, the data center only needs to purchase low-price white card machines, and then purchase several servers to install the controller software to complete the establishment of the data center network, compared with the previous Purchase of various network devices, the cost is much lower. Likewise, storage devices, security devices, Server Load balancer, and other devices can centrally control the devices by software, and separate the hardware data processing and software control plane of these devices, the work of the entire device is centrally controlled by the software, which not only facilitates resizing and management, but also greatly reduces construction costs and future maintenance costs. Of course, there is still a long way to go before the data center can implement centralized software control throughout the system. There are not only a lot of technical difficulties to solve, but also a process for people to understand new technologies, new technologies have not yet formed a series of problems, such as uniform standards and incompatible technologies among various manufacturers. This process is a process that every technological change must go through, in this process, some technologies will inevitably be eliminated, some manufacturers will be eliminated, and some new manufacturers will emerge, resulting in some new data center industry giant manufacturers. In any case, the trend of data center software will not change, and the role of software in the future data center will become more and more important.

We have seen the new ethos brought by software to the data center, and various new software technologies are constantly applied to the new data center. Traditional hardware vendors have begun to accept this fact, it is no longer a matter of history that the hardware has gained a high market profit and a leader in the world. The software has become a stage of history, and has become the main character in the data center stage, let the software show in the data center!