The article provides a comprehensive overview of NVMe over Fabrics, detailing its RDMA and TCP transport options, NVM subsystem architecture, namespace sharing, multi‑path I/O, reservation mechanisms, and industry adoption, highlighting its performance benefits for AI, ML, and real‑time analytics workloads.
The interview with cloud expert Tu Chuan reveals how traditional enterprises are shifting from legacy three‑tier data centers to hybrid and public cloud solutions, highlighting motivations, success stories, common pain points, and the technical advantages that drive faster, cost‑effective digital transformation.
This article explains DNS fundamentals, the step‑by‑step resolution process, TTL caching, and how DNS‑based Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) can direct traffic to the nearest active data‑center, providing a practical guide for building multi‑active, high‑availability infrastructures.
The Open Compute Project, backed by leading tech giants, is driving open‑hardware standards, accelerating AI and edge computing, and fostering collaboration across data‑center operators, telecoms, and hardware vendors, as highlighted by the upcoming OCP China Day conference.
The article explains the evolution of NVMe‑oF, compares RDMA, FC and TCP transports, highlights the advantages and challenges of NVMe/TCP in modern data‑center and cloud storage, and discusses Lightbits' LightOS and accelerator card as a cost‑effective solution for high‑performance distributed storage.
This article examines how data center operators and the supply chain are advancing toward 400 Gbps Ethernet, detailing the technical innovations, market forces, and future challenges that shape high‑speed networking, optical modules, and ASIC development for ultra‑large scale data centers.
This article details UCloud's transition from the V3 to V4 data‑center network architecture, explaining why the older design fell short, how the new 25 G/100 G three‑level CLOS, POD, and DC Group concepts were implemented, and the resulting four‑fold increase in server‑port capacity and performance.
The article explains Nvidia's $6.9 billion acquisition of Mellanox, outlines Mellanox's history and product portfolio, and provides a detailed overview of InfiniBand architecture, network topologies, protocols, and related software stacks such as OFED, highlighting their importance for data‑center, HPC, and cloud environments.
Intel has reportedly offered $5.5 billion to acquire Mellanox Technologies, a leading provider of high‑performance networking hardware, sparking interest from multiple tech giants and analysts who see the deal as a potential boost for data‑center AI, big‑data analytics, and HPC capabilities.
An in‑depth analysis of China's IDC market predicts continued growth beyond 200 billion yuan by 2020, outlines evolving development models that combine large‑scale, energy‑efficient facilities with micro‑IDC edge deployments, and examines technological trends such as cloudification, modular data centers, high‑density, green, and customized solutions.
Alibaba and Nanyang Technological University have built a high‑precision, real‑time CFD change‑sandbox system that integrates with DCIM to simulate and validate data‑center HVAC modifications, enabling automated, accurate impact assessment, reducing fault risk, and supporting design optimization and operational automation.
This article examines the evolution from legacy SCSI and SAS storage protocols to NVMe and NVMe over Fabrics, explaining the performance bottlenecks of traditional storage, the technical advantages of NVMe, deployment options, vendor implementations, and future trends shaping data‑center storage architectures.
The article outlines Huawei's development of ARM‑based server CPUs, especially the 7nm Hi1620 processor, detailing its architecture, core counts, cache hierarchy, memory and I/O capabilities, and its significance for modern data‑center and cloud computing workloads.
The article provides a comprehensive overview of the OpenPower initiative, explaining its origins, the formation of the OpenPower Foundation and Alliance, the technical and collaborative principles behind the Power architecture, and the growing ecosystem of hardware, software, and industry partners driving its adoption in data centers and cloud environments.
This article provides a detailed technical overview of data‑center (computer‑room) construction, covering renovation, ceiling, wall, partition, shielding, lightning protection, power distribution, HVAC, UPS, fire safety, and monitoring systems to ensure reliability, safety, and efficient operation.
This article provides a detailed overview of Internet Data Center (IDC) design, covering classification levels, functional zones, network architecture, server and storage systems, power and cooling infrastructure, fire protection, security, and green building practices for reliable, uninterrupted operation.
The article describes a comprehensive data‑center automation solution that standardizes hardware, implements a CMDB‑driven workflow, integrates procurement, visualization, fault diagnosis, and fine‑grained component management to improve efficiency, accuracy, and reliability of large‑scale operations.
UCloud’s physical network orchestrator automates large‑scale data‑center switch configuration, reducing IDC network build cycles from 2‑3 days to 2‑3 hours, boosting success rates to 99%, while handling 3000+ switches, 200 Gbps access throughput, and supporting hybrid‑cloud real‑time connectivity through a scenario‑driven, Kafka‑backed architecture.
The article describes Alibaba's HAIL 5.1 data‑center network architecture introduced for the 2018 Double‑11 event, detailing its high‑availability de‑stacking design, low‑latency RDMA deployment, and future HAIL 2.0 evolution to support larger‑scale, intelligent, and high‑performance cloud networking.
This article explains the evolution of storage networking, the performance bottlenecks of legacy SCSI‑based protocols, and how NVMe and NVMe over Fabrics leverage PCIe, RDMA, and high‑speed fabrics to deliver massive parallelism, lower latency, and a new paradigm for data‑center storage architectures.
This article provides a comprehensive overview of data‑center rack cabinets, covering size specifications, power and cooling requirements, key industry standards such as IEC 60297‑1 and EIA‑310‑D, structural components, environmental considerations, load capacity, and practical design guidelines for safe and efficient deployment.
Alibaba introduces Open Channel SSD and Fusion Engine, a unified storage architecture that addresses modern data‑center challenges by enhancing performance, flexibility, cost efficiency, and determinism through open hardware interfaces and advanced user‑space storage engines.
The 2018 Hangzhou Yunqi Conference featured a series of expert talks on intelligent operations, covering Alibaba's AI‑driven maintenance systems, robust supply‑chain optimization, data‑center automation, MSP transformation, and AI‑Ops practices, providing actionable insights for large‑scale infrastructure management.
This article explains the fundamentals of NVMe‑oF, the role of InfiniBand components such as HCAs, switches, subnet managers and gateways, and why NetApp chose InfiniBand for its EF570/E5700 storage systems, highlighting performance benefits and protocol coexistence.
A 6.7‑magnitude earthquake struck Hokkaido, plunging the region into a week‑long power outage that jeopardized local data centers reliant on limited‑capacity generators, while experts emphasize that worldwide earthquake prediction remains unreliable and stress the importance of prevention over forecasting.
The article explains Google’s end‑to‑end production infrastructure—including the edge network, data‑center hierarchy, Borg‑based cluster management, storage systems like Colossus and Spanner, monitoring with Borgmon, inter‑task RPC via Stubby, and the code‑to‑production pipeline using Piper, Blaze, Rapid, and Sisyphus—illustrating how requests travel from users to services in milliseconds.
In his 2018 Trusted Cloud Conference talk, Tencent FPGA expert Zhang Heng explained how the rapid growth of data and AI workloads drives data‑center and cloud operators to adopt FPGA acceleration for its high‑throughput, low‑latency, programmable performance, citing Tencent’s successes in image transcoding, content‑moderation, AI inference and gene‑sequencing, while outlining ecosystem challenges and future plans for scalable cloud‑FPGA services.
This article provides a comprehensive overview of Fibre Channel switches, covering NPIV virtualization, zone concepts and types, various port modes for long‑distance links, fiber cable and optical module choices, credit buffer considerations, ISL trunking, and special port configurations such as Brocade AG mode.
GitHub’s GLB Director is an open‑source, layer‑4 load balancer designed for data‑center environments that scales a single IP across thousands of servers, uses ECMP, a stateless director layer, DPDK‑accelerated packet processing, and health‑check mechanisms to provide high‑availability without disrupting existing connections.
The Intersect360 report surveys nearly 60 storage vendors across 391 high‑performance computing sites, revealing a 24% increase in total capacity to 2.4 EB since 2015, growing adoption of PB‑scale systems, dominant vendors DDN, Dell EMC and IBM, and a modest but rising share of cloud storage, while projecting market revenue to rise from $4.87 B in 2015 to $6.57 B by 2020.
Scheduling algorithms are a crucial component of cluster resource management systems, determining where containerized tasks run to ensure resource needs, high availability, fault tolerance, and cost efficiency across individual containers, applications, and entire data centers, while also supporting Alibaba’s global scheduling challenge.
The article outlines Qunar's data‑center network evolution, describing the limitations of traditional STP‑based designs, the adoption of vPC for active‑active redundancy, the transition to leaf‑spine topology for scalability, and the implementation of VXLAN to support large‑scale multi‑tenant cloud environments.
This article explains how modern data centers rely on cluster resource management systems and sophisticated scheduling algorithms to allocate containers across machines, improve application availability, reduce costs, and meet diverse constraints, while also introducing Alibaba’s global scheduling algorithm competition and its challenge details.
This article explains the core concepts of Fibre Channel (FC) switches, covering NPIV virtualization, SAN zoning, various port types, long‑distance modes, ISL trunking, and related hardware such as optical modules and fiber cables, providing a comprehensive guide for data‑center networking professionals.
This article chronicles Tencent's network journey from its modest 2004 infrastructure through rapid expansion, critical incidents, and architectural breakthroughs like SET zones, SDN, and MPLS VPN, illustrating how the company transformed its data‑center operations to support massive user growth.
This article chronicles Tencent’s network infrastructure development over the past two decades, detailing early IDC setups, major outages, rapid expansion during the gaming boom, the introduction of SET architecture, large‑scale data centers, SDN and DCI implementations, and ongoing challenges as the company embraces mobile and cloud services.
NVMe over Fabrics, leveraging PCIe and RDMA, replaces legacy SCSI and SAS protocols to deliver vastly higher bandwidth and lower latency for SSDs, enabling massive parallel I/O queues, and reshaping data‑center storage architectures through both FC‑NVMe and Ethernet‑based implementations.
The article explains why traditional Layer‑2 networks hinder VM live migration in dual‑active data centers, introduces the concept of big‑layer networking, and details how VxLAN overcomes VLAN limits and loop issues to enable uninterrupted cross‑site service continuity.
The article explains how Alibaba tackled the slowdown of Moore's law and TCO constraints by progressively customizing X86 CPUs—from selecting vendor SKUs to requesting bespoke specifications and adding micro‑code features—to boost performance and efficiency for massive events like Double 11.
The article details JD.com’s large‑scale, automated server operating‑system deployment process for the 11.11 shopping festival, describing the challenges of tight timelines, massive equipment volumes, the development of an automated deployment platform, and the operational improvements achieved through process optimization and 24/7 support.
This article explains how integrating IP SAN and FC SAN with FCoE simplifies data‑center networks, reduces hardware and power consumption, improves flexibility and reliability, and details the deployment modes, access‑layer design, high‑availability considerations, and traffic models for a unified LAN/SAN architecture.
This article explains the origin, standards, architecture, and enhanced Ethernet requirements of Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), detailing its protocol model, networking types, and the benefits of lossless Ethernet for data‑center storage connectivity.
The article explains HPE 3PAR's Storage Federation features—including Peer Motion, Online Import, and Peer Persistence—detailing their mechanisms, benefits, and comparisons with active‑active solutions and similar offerings from Dell and Fujitsu for high‑availability storage architectures.
At the ICT China High‑Level Forum, JD's self‑built Suqian data center was honored with the 2017 Data Center Annual Infrastructure Design Innovation Award, highlighting its advanced power, cooling, and energy‑efficiency technologies that set a new benchmark for high‑performance data centers in China.
The article explains how RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) reduces CPU involvement, lowers latency, and increases bandwidth in data‑center networks, describes JD.com’s practical deployments across AI, big‑data, storage, and HPC workloads, and highlights industry trends toward broader RDMA adoption.
This article examines why electricity dominates data‑center operating costs, outlines practical green‑IT measures—including enclosure design, airflow management, lighting, and renewable power—and presents three detailed case studies that illustrate how modular design, cold‑aisle containment, and innovative cooling can dramatically reduce PUE and overall energy consumption.
JD’s self‑constructed data center in Suqian, Jiangsu, combines innovative free‑cooling, high‑efficiency chillers, redundant power architecture, and advanced monitoring to deliver over 180 days of natural cooling, reduce PUE to ≤1.3, and ensure continuous operation with robust backup systems.
This guide explains why precise power usage assessment is crucial for data‑center safety and efficiency, introduces Dell’s free online Enterprise Infrastructure Planning Tool, provides the web and download links, and walks through step‑by‑step configuration of voltage, devices, PSU selection, summary view, and exporting results to PDF or Excel.
This article explains the growing need for more efficient data‑center networking, introduces Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) technology, describes its working principles, operation types, and how it can be layered over TCP/Ethernet to reduce latency and CPU overhead in high‑performance environments.
This article provides a comprehensive overview of InfiniBand technology, covering its history, performance advantages over traditional interconnects, architectural concepts, layered protocol specifications, and typical use cases in high‑performance computing and data‑center environments.
This article explains why dual‑active data centers are needed, outlines the evolution from primary‑backup to active‑active designs, and provides detailed guidance on implementing dual‑active solutions across the data, storage, application, and virtualization layers, including critical networking and performance considerations.
The article examines how the shared‑economy mindset is transforming data‑center infrastructure—from modular designs and integrated solutions to new business models—driving lower costs, higher efficiency, and a shift from construction‑focused to operation‑focused competition across the entire ecosystem.
Alibaba senior technology director Xie Chongjin explains the company's ambitious roadmap for optical communication networks, tracing their historical roots, current technical challenges such as the Shannon limit, and future standards that aim to accelerate data‑center bandwidth while keeping costs under control.
The article explains why data‑center cabinets, though often overlooked, are critical infrastructure, detailing required dimensions, load and power capacities, cooling and ventilation needs, relevant IEC and EIA standards, material and safety features, and best practices for installation and management.
This article examines Alibaba's strategies for designing and deploying custom x86 processors, SSDs, high‑performance storage solutions, and next‑generation chassis to meet the massive, diverse demands of its global data‑center infrastructure while optimizing cost, energy efficiency, and scalability.
This article demystifies hyper‑convergence by explaining its definition, technical components, market evolution, hardware trends, scaling models, and the role of networking, while clarifying common misconceptions and outlining future directions for enterprise data‑center architecture.
The article explains how container technology is reshaping data‑center storage through Container‑Defined Storage (CDS), discusses the limitations of traditional storage architectures, highlights Portworx’s approach, and outlines the requirements for service‑oriented, distributed, and hyper‑converged storage in modern cloud‑native environments.
The article uses the analogy of heavy rain flooding to explain network flooding and broadcast storms, describing how Ethernet switches handle unknown frames, why loops cause endless broadcast traffic, and how VLAN segmentation and spanning‑tree protocols mitigate these issues in modern data‑center architectures.
This article examines the compatibility challenges in data‑center environments, outlining how hardware, software, firmware, and networking components across multiple layers—from applications and operating systems to storage, virtualization, and disaster‑recovery—must be coordinated to ensure seamless, efficient operation.
This article provides an in‑depth technical overview of data‑center active‑active architectures, covering network interconnects, storage SAN/Fibre Channel links, application clustering, arbitration mechanisms, gateway‑based designs, technical requirements, and practical limitations for achieving end‑to‑end high availability.
This article provides a detailed overview of VMware NSX SDN, explaining its key components—NSX Manager, virtual switches, controller, and Edge services—and how they enable software‑defined networking, virtualized routing, firewalls, load balancing, and other layer‑2 to layer‑7 functions in modern data‑center environments.
The article explains how traditional SAN storage creates CPU‑I/O bottlenecks, how Google’s distributed file system inspired hyper‑converged designs that fuse compute and storage, and why tiered storage with SSD and HDD offers scalable, high‑performance infrastructure for modern data‑center workloads.
This article examines how big data analysis, enabled by Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) tools, can improve reliability, energy efficiency, and decision‑making in IDC (data center) operations through cross‑system data integration, monitoring, and predictive analytics.
This article outlines comprehensive data center architecture designs, covering core cabling zones, LAN, SAN, and KVM network topologies, distributed and modular POD structures, and ToR/TOR switching solutions, highlighting wiring strategies, scalability, and efficiency considerations for modern enterprise facilities.
This article explains China's green data‑center policies, the importance of PUE, and demonstrates through calculations and real‑world Dalian case studies how natural cooling can halve cooling energy use, lower PUE from 2.5 to 2.0, and save millions in electricity bills.
This article explains data‑center wiring zones, LAN, SAN and KVM network architectures, common distributed designs, modular POD concepts, and Top‑of‑Rack (ToR) switching, providing detailed guidance on cabling, equipment placement, and scalability for modern data‑center operations.
This article presents an overview of Ctrip's cloud platform built on OpenStack, details the architecture and components of Ceph storage—including RGW and RBD—describes deployment configurations across multiple data centers, and discusses real-world use cases such as hotel image feature storage and cross‑region continuous delivery.
This article summarizes a seasoned operations expert’s insights on data‑center management, covering the evolution from ad‑hoc automation to a closed‑loop CMDB‑driven system, the six key capabilities for future data centers, and practical definitions of operations, automation, and DevOps.
In a candid Q&A, industry veterans discuss the fundamental differences between internet and traditional banking operations, share experiences transitioning between sectors, and outline strategies to eliminate difficult data‑center maintenance, highlighting risk‑focused versus growth‑driven approaches.
The article examines how internet companies drive hardware reconstruction, covering large‑scale server and rack customization, modular storage solutions, and the role of AI‑focused hardware, highlighting the shift toward open‑source designs, scale‑out capabilities, and integrated cabinet deployments for modern cloud infrastructures.
This article chronicles the birth and evolution of China’s Project Scorpio—from its 2011 launch through Scorpio 1.0 and 2.0 specifications—highlighting its collaboration with Intel, its technical trade‑offs with Open Rack, and its impact on data‑center operations and standards.
The article examines how Facebook’s massive data centers operate at scale, detailing server serviceability, automated fault‑diagnosis systems like CYBORG, staffing ratios, and the engineering practices that enable reliable service for billions of users worldwide.
In an interview at the DCD Shanghai conference, Alibaba’s network planning expert Cao Jie explains how the company views Software‑Defined Networking, its benefits for operational efficiency and flexibility, and its roadmap for deploying SDN across Alibaba’s data‑center infrastructure to support cloud computing and e‑commerce workloads.
Facebook’s Cold Storage system redesigns hardware and software to store rarely accessed data with up to 75% lower power consumption, modular 2U racks holding 30 disks, Reed‑Solomon erasure coding for cheap redundancy, and a self‑healing “anti‑entropy” process that improves performance as the system scales.
Using the thriller "The Call of Terror" as a metaphor, this article explains how weak controls in an internal network’s APP zone can let attackers bypass firewalls, and how eSDK‑enabled security policies and TSOC analytics can automatically block malicious traffic.
The presentation reviews Alibaba's ongoing transition to a large‑scale, SDN‑driven data‑center network using OpenFlow hybrid switches, VXLAN overlay, automated deployment, and discusses the challenges, solutions, and future directions for network elasticity, hybrid cloud integration, and standardization.
This article examines Facebook's cold storage system, detailing how the company redesigned hardware and software to slash power consumption, improve reliability with Reed‑Solomon coding, mitigate bit‑rot, and balance loads while supporting massive photo archives in energy‑constrained data centers.
This interview with Alibaba's Lin Hao (aka Bi Xuan) explains why the company pursued a multi‑active, geographically distributed data‑center architecture, how it was deployed for the 2014 Double‑11 event, and the technical challenges—including latency, routing consistency, and data synchronization—that had to be solved to achieve high availability and low‑cost disaster recovery.
This article outlines four key practices—comprehensive engineering documentation, robust business backup, continuous online monitoring, and regular periodic inspections—that together ensure optimal performance, reliability, and long‑term benefits for data center operations.
An in‑depth overview of VMware’s extensive product lineup—including data‑center and cloud infrastructure tools, management suites, desktop virtualization, and free utilities—explains each solution’s purpose, key features, and typical use cases for enterprises and individual users alike.
