Computing Pods: Large-Scale Building Blocks for Intelligent, Automated Data Center Deployments

IT infrastructures tend to become ever more complex as administrators support growth with incremental hardware expansion, which in turn calls for increased real estate, power, cooling, and maintenance. Faced with shrinking budgets, many organizations end up dedicating a majority of their IT spending to simply maintaining data center resources—placing serious constraints on their ability to advance new initiatives.The computing pod is an exciting model for IT infrastructure that helps significantly advance enterprise efficiency. It is defined as a self-contained building block encompassing an optimized power and cooling footprint to facilitate scalability; integrated compute, storage, and network nodes of significant size and processing power; and simplified data center deployment and management to help reduce operational costs. Dell recommends that each pod include the Dell™ PowerEdge™ modular blade enclosure with PowerEdge blade servers; virtualized storage such as Dell EqualLogic™ PS6000 series Internet SCSI (iSCSI) storage area network (SAN) arrays; virtualization software such as the VMware® vSphere™, Microsoft® Hyper-V™, or Citrix® XenServer™ platforms; a management module with software such as the Dell Management Console; and switches with stacking capability such as Cisco Catalyst Blade Switch 3100 series switches. This pod architecture then becomes the basic unit of data center deployment.By elevating data center intelligence through advanced virtualization and software tools in combination with latest-generation server, storage, and network infrastructure, organizations can create highly scalable, self-managing data centers designed to reduce IT infrastructure complexity, simplify management, and increase cost-efficiency. And because this approach can be customized to specific needs, it can provide a flexible computing infrastructure that can quickly and easily adapt to evolving requirements.Also covered: How Dell Business-Ready Configurations can provide a simplified, scalable, resilient architecture for computing pod deployments.