What is Hyperscale?
Hyperscale describes a system or technology architecture’s ability to scale as demand for resources gets added to it. Hyperscale computing meets organizations’ growing data demands and adds extra resources to large, distributed computing networks without requiring additional cooling, electrical power, or physical space.
Hyperscale infrastructure involves scalable cloud computing systems with massive numbers of servers connected to a network. Servers can be increased or decreased according to the needs of a network and as performance requirements demand.
Hyperscale is crucial to constructing strong, scalable distributed infrastructure systems, which meet the big data and cloud computing requirements of the modern enterprise. It is the combination of the compute, storage, and virtualization layers of infrastructure in a single-solution architecture. It is typically associated with large cloud computing and data center providers.
How Hyperscale Works
Hyperscale computing abandons the high-grade constructs typically seen in conventional computing systems. Instead, it favors stripped-down designs that look to maximize the effectiveness of hardware, which is more cost-effective and enables greater investment in software requirements.
Hyperscale computing works by networking servers horizontally, enabling them to quickly and simply be added or removed as capacity demands increase and decrease. A load balancer manages this process by monitoring the amount of data that needs to be processed, handling requests, and distributing resources to the capacities available. The load balancer continuously checks servers’ workload with the data volumes that need to be processed and adds additional servers as required.
Hyperscale Benefits
Hyperscale makes it easier for organizations to find data, limits excessive data copying, simplifies data backups, and applies security controls and policies. This ensures cost-effective scaling and flexibility, and enables organizations to maximize the hardware resources available to them.
Hyperscale offers tightly integrated computing and networking, allowing organizations to fully utilize their hardware and get more out of what they already have. This makes it quick and straightforward for businesses to run big data analytics and cloud computing projects.
Hyperscale Data Center
Traditional data centers are centralized facilities that store organizations’ critical data and applications. They use computing and networking systems and equipment to store data and enable users’ access to resources.
Hyperscale data centers are significantly larger, to the extent that they can house millions of servers and more virtual machines than traditional data centers. They provide a highly responsive, scalable, and cost-effective infrastructure that reduces complexity and improves business operations. This makes hyperscale data centers crucial as organizations’ data storage and usage requirements increase.
Architecture
Hyperscale data-center facilities are at least 10,000 square feet and house more than 5,000 servers that run on ultra-high-speed, high-fiber networks. That said, Facebook’s fifth hyperscale data center in Fort Worth, Texas, is set to encompass five buildings with a total space of more than 2.5 million square feet.
Hyperscale data centers use a new server design with wider racks that can accommodate more components and are easily changeable to allow customization. This enables servers to have multiple power suppliers and hard drives, for example, while providers like Facebook and Google build supercomputers to customize their hyperscale needs.
Traffico
Hyperscale data centers receive, process, and route traffic using scaling. This includes horizontal scaling to increase the number of machines and vertical scaling to add more power to machines already being used.
Automation
A hyperscale data-center provides consistent automation, which helps organizations manage all aspects of production. This includes managing high-traffic volume websites and advanced workloads that demand specialized processing, such as cryptography, genome processing, and three-dimensional rendering.
Benefits of a Hyperscale Data Center
Hyperscale data centers address the issues that organizations encounter with storing their ever-increasing data volumes in traditional data centers. They help organizations reduce costs while ensuring superb user experiences regardless of the level of data usage.
Cooling Efficiency
Most data centers' largest operational expense is cooling their systems. Hyperscale data centers reduce these costs by concentrating the cooling power toward the servers that host high-intensity workloads. Hyperscale facilities also optimize airflow to ensure hot air only flows in one direction and reclaim and recycle the heat.
Balanced Workloads
An overheated server can cause issues for other nearby servers and network equipment. Hyperscale data centers avoid this risk by distributing and relocating workloads across servers, which avoids overheating.
Electrical Power Divided Into Packets
Hyperscale data centers allocate electrical power through a set number of kilowatts and even fractions of megawatts. This enables data-center tenants to lease space in kilowatts, rather than the number of racks or square footage they require.
What Is a Hyperscaler?
Hyperscalers are the large cloud computing and cloud service providers that drive the growth of big data and cloud computing. These organizations, such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, have a global scale, expertise, and innovation that take cloud services and value to the next level.
Therefore, it is crucial for organizations that have ambitions to grow to invest with these hyperscalers as business partners and suppliers.
How Fortinet Can Help
Securing any data center is critical to protecting organizations’ data and networks. But the size and performance needs of hyperscale data centers require a next-generation firewall (NGFW) that protects them from the latest threats in the evolving cybersecurity landscape.
The FortiGate NGFW secures enterprise data centers by inspecting traffic at hyperscale speeds and providing deeper content inspection capabilities than standard firewall protection. FortiGate enables organizations to identify and block advanced attacks and malware threats, gain visibility across their entire attack surface, and evolve to block the latest threats as they arise. Fortinet is a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Network Firewalls, which means it protects any edge and environment at scale while reducing cost and complexity and improving operational efficiency.
