Evolution of the DC

Data centers have evolved significantly in recent years, adopting technologies such as virtualization, software defined storage, and the cloud to optimize resource utilization and increase IT agility and flexibility.

A data center hosts a lot of IT equipment from servers, to storage, to network equipment. All of this equipment has undergone a lot of change with the evolution of technology. We will explore some of the evolution that has happened in recent years in the DC technologies in the following section.

Network

Traditional data centers were built using a three-tier architecture with core, aggregation, and access layers, or a two-tier collapsed core with the aggregation and core layers combined into one layer, as shown in the following figure. This architecture provides optimal packet forwarding when the data flow follows a north-south traffic pattern, where one end of the traffic flow is outside the DC (the WAN link or the campus network) and the other end is the servers...