This document discusses virtual data centers as an alternative to traditional physical data centers. It defines a virtual data center as one that uses virtualization technology to partition physical servers into multiple virtual machines. Key benefits of virtual data centers include cost savings through more efficient hardware use, easier management and maintenance of virtual rather than physical resources, and faster recovery from failures through data backups and migration of virtual machines. The document recommends 10/40/100 Gigabit Ethernet as necessary infrastructure to support a virtualized data center and realize these benefits.

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Fiberstore (FS.COM) | Do You Know Virtual Data Center?
Data centers are important to our daily life and work. However, in traditional data centers,
engineers are struggling with the need to use multiple tools to maintain the data center
management, like provisioning, managing and monitoring server, which is complex, expensive,
inefficient and labor-intensive. Is there any better method to solve those problems and improve
data center? The answer is virtualization. A modern data center is considered to be the future of the
data center, which is known as virtual data center.
What Is Virtual Data Center?
A traditional data center is built by adding more compute, more storage and more networking,
while a virtual data center is a data center that operates using virtualization technology which
partitions a single physical server into multiple operating systems and applications, thereby
emulating multiple servers, known as virtual machines (VMs). In other words, in a virtual data
center all the infrastructure is virtualized and the control of the hardware configuration is
automated through intelligent software system. This is the largest difference between the
traditional and virtual data centers as well as one of the outstanding advantages of virtual data
center.
Benefits of Virtual Data Center
As mentioned that data center virtualization is considered as the trend of the future data center.
But what can virtual data center provide? What’s the advantages of virtual data center compared
with the traditional one? The main abilities and advantages of virtual data center are illustrated in
this part.
 Cost Saving: it is known that hardware is usually the highest cost in data center. The
development of the traditional data center depends on hardware and storage. Except the cost
of hardware, the management and maintenance of the hardware are largely depend on labor
operation of which the cost would go well beyond that of hardware. Thus, with virtual data
center, the costs would be cut largely.
 Easier Management and Maintenance: in traditional data center, things like heat dissipation,
Do You Know Virtual
Data Center?

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Fiberstore (FS.COM) | Do You Know Virtual Data Center?
physical server, data backup and testing should be considered. And a lot of labor work and
money has gone into these part of daily management and maintenance. Virtualize the servers
using less physical hardware, less heat would be generated. The backup steps would be much
easier in a virtual data center operated by software. Both full backups and snapshots of the
virtual server and virtual machines can be done and these VMs can be moved from one server
to another easier and faster. As to testing, with virtual data center the testing environments can
be isolated from end users while keeping them online. When you’ve perfected your work,
deploy it as live.
 Faster Recovery: if the a physical server dies, the
redeployment might need a lot of time. However,
with virtualization, the redeploy can occur within
minutes with just a few clicks. Facing disaster, if the
data center is virtualized, with up-to-date snapshots
of your VMs, you can quickly get back up and
running. With virtual data center, a host of issues go
away.
 Closer to Cloud: with virtual machines, you will be
closer to enjoying a Cloud environment. You may
even reach the point where you can deploy VMs to
and from your data center to create a powerful cloud-based infrastructure. But beyond the
actual virtual machines, that virtualization technology gets you closer to a cloud-based mindset,
making the migration all the more easy.
The First Step to Achieve Virtual Data Center
These outstanding benefits are the main factors that drive the trend of data center to virtualization.
However, to take full advantages of the virtual data center, many challenges are ahead, like security,
allocating resources, maximizing investments in infrastructure. One of the most conspicuous
challenges is bandwidth. As mentioned, virtual data center is automated through intelligent
software system, which need the support of high bandwidth. Currently 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) is
now being widely adopted which could be a good choice for a storage access network. However,
there might be potential blocks in the journey to virtual data center with 10GbE. To fully realized the
benefits of a virtualized environment, the implementation for 40/100 GbE is recommended as the
first step to virtualization. Currently, more vendors are supplying solutions for 40/100GbE. The cost
of 40/100GbE is decreasing in a foreseen future. The increased traction of 40/100GbE has led to its
best practice status as the standard for the next generation of high-bandwidth virtualized
application.
Conclusion
The trend of the data center virtualization is clear with great benefits and potential application that

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virtual data center can bring to us. 40/100GbE is just the first step of the journey to virtual data
center, barriers like security and resources are there to be broken down.
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Notice: This document is for informational purposes only and does not set forth any warranty, expressed or
implied, concerning any equipment, equipment features, or service offered or to be offered by Fiberstore.
Fiberstore reserves the right to make changes to this document at any time, without notice, and assumes no
responsibility for its use. This information document describes features that may not be currently available.
Contact a Fiberstore sales team for information on feature and product availability.
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