Efficiency in Networks and Data Centers

Today's data center supports enterprise software applications with an intricate system of hardware, such as computing power, network resources, and storage.

To optimize these critical business applications, the physical and logical design of the data center network must provide an environment that is flexible, secure, and highly available. Today’s enterprise must deliver better goods and services to customers at a lower cost to address:

• Ever-increasing customer demands
• Volatile market forces
• Global competition

The Oracle E-Business Suite is an extensive set of business applications to help enterprises meet these challenges. These applications are part of a flexible framework to protect, extend, and evolve business processes.

An architectural overview of Oracle E-Business Suite 11i running in a Cisco data center encompasses two components: the data center and its network. The two work together to create an optimized environment. The data center is a repository for enterprise software applications, which continuously change both to meet business requirements and to accommodate the latest technological advances and methods. As a result, the network infrastructure hosting these software applications must also be flexible enough to continually change.

Data Center Architecture

The data center has evolved from the classic client/server model to an N-tier approach, where the “N” means any number of functional areas on each tier. Each tier can consist of one or more physical hosts to provide the enterprise with the required performance or application availability. The N-tier model offers a more scalable and manageable enterprise application environment, because it creates distinct serviceable areas in the software application. Because the application is distributed, single points of failure are removed from the design, and the architecture as a whole becomes more resilient.

Fundamentally, this architecture encompasses three tiers:

• Web front-end, or desktop
• Application business logic
• Database

The desktop tier consists of the client user interface, usually a Web browser, which allows the client to access the server directly. The application tier of the Oracle E-Business Suite provides administrative services and business logic, allowing end users at the desktop tier to access information residing in the database tier.

Network Architecture

We can divide the devices in the data center infrastructure into the front-end network and the back-end network, depending on their role. The front-end network provides the IP routing and switching environment, including connectivity from:

• Client to server
• Server to server
• Server to storage

The back-end network supports connectivity between servers and other storage devices, such as storage arrays and tape drives.

The front-end network contains three distinct functional areas:

• Core: a gateway that uses 10 Gigabit Ethernet links and routing best practices to optimize traffic flow and provide high-speed connectivity to external entities, such as the campus WAN, intranet, or extranet.
• Aggregation: the point of convergence for network traffic that provides connectivity between servers at the access layer and the rest of the enterprise.
• Access layers: a flexible, efficient, and predictable environment to support client-to-server and server-to-server traffic.

To support the centralized application services in the enterprise data center, the architecture also addresses multi-tier deployments, such as in the Oracle E-Business Suite. These technologies include:

• Load balancing
• Firewall and other security services
• High availability
• Virtualization
• Performance optimization

The basic Cisco data center architecture is a comprehensive approach that allows the network and the applications it supports to work together. The architecture uses network design best practices to reduce the complexity and implementation time of enterprise applications in the data center. Its primary goal is to provide a secure environment for business transactions while simultaneously increasing enterprise application performance, availability, scalability, and manageability.