What is a Hyperscale Data Center?

A hyperscale data center horizontally integrates servers to improve resiliency and scalability. By tightly integrating compute, storage, and virtualization layers into a single solution behind robust network security, a hyperscale can rapidly and seamlessly scale to meet demand by provisioning additional resources as needed.

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The Main Characteristics of a Hyperscale Data Center

The goal of a hyperscale data center is to ensure that the data center always has the resources and capacity needed to fulfill business and operational needs. Some of the key characteristics of hyperscale data centers include the following:

High Availability: Hyperscale data centers use a high availability (HA) firewall to secure and load balance traffic across a server cluster. The inherent redundancy in this design maximizes availability by eliminating single points of failure within the system.
Maximum System Resilience: Hyperscale data centers have built-in redundancy and the ability to expand capacity on demand. This creates a highly resilient system where traffic can be rebalanced or new instances spun up if a node fails.

Uncompromising Cyber Security: Data center assets, whether on-premises or in the cloud, must be fully secured against attacks or unauthorized access. This includes securing the network, data, applications/workloads, access rights, and communications between IT systems. Furthermore, a zero-trust security design must be able support extremely high network throughput demands found in large data center environments.

Intelligent Load Balancing: Hyperscale load balancers monitor the health of the cluster and intelligently distribute traffic across them. This helps to boost the resiliency, availability, and performance of the system.

Easy Scaling: Hyperscale data centers integrate intelligent load balancing and virtualized compute and storage resources. As a result, a hyperscale data center can rapidly deploy additional capacity to scale up to meet increased demand.
Efficient Resource Utilization: Hyperscale data centers implement N+1 clustering deployments with efficient, intelligent load balancing. This minimizes the cost of the data center while maximizing availability and resiliency.
Usability: Hyperscale data centers integrate compute, storage, and virtualization into a single solution. This makes the system easier to manage and simple to operate.

Benefits of Hyperscale Data Centers

Hyperscale data centers provide numerous benefits to an organization. Some of the main advantages they offer include the following:

Dynamic Scalability with Ease: By rapidly spinning up or reallocating additional resources and adding them to an existing cluster, a hyperscale DC can seamlessly grow to many times its original capacity without the traditional operational complexity or forklift upgrades and downtimes.
Cloud-Level Resiliency: One of the main advantages of cloud computing over on-premises data centers is the additional resiliency provided by cloud environments. Hyperscale data centers can provide an equivalent level of 99.999% resiliency on-premises via intelligent load balancing and seamless scalability.
Cybersecurity at Scale: Data centers hold the crown jewels of most organizations. Implementing a scalable zero-trust data center security design requires both advanced threat prevention along with a security infrastructure capable of keeping up with extremely high network throughput and ultra-low latency demands of data center environments.
Operational Simplicity: Integration is one of the core tenets of hyperscale data centers. This tight integration not only improves performance but also makes the solution easier to operate and secure by decreasing the number of independent parts.
Cost Efficiency: Hyperscale data centers commonly use intelligent load balancing and multiple firewalls in a cluster to achieve full resiliency. Hyperscale utilizes all of the compute resources in the cluster (vs. legacy 1+1 designs where half of all resources are in pure ‘stand-by’ mode and unutilized). Hyperscale provides maximum resiliency at a much lower cost of hardware, power/cooling, and real estate (rack space).

The Need for a Hyperscale Data Center Security Solution

Hyperscale DC provide the ability to rapidly scale storage and compute resources to meet demand. By scaling horizontally behind a load balancer, a hyperscale data center can rapidly add additional resources to a cluster to scale without disrupting operations.

However, the availability and resiliency benefits of a hyperscale data center are only achieved if every component of the data center has the same level of resiliency and availability. Otherwise, a single point of failure or a bottleneck can reduce the performance of the entire system.

For this reason, hyperscale network security solutions are an essential component of a hyperscale data center. All traffic entering and leaving a data center must be inspected and secured. If data center security solutions do not offer at least the same level of availability, scalability, and resiliency as the data center itself, then a dangerous tradeoff exists between data center performance and security.

Hyperscale Network Security with Check Point

Hyperscalability is invaluable to many industries where maximum performance, high-availability and resiliency are important. Critical infrastructure, finance, e-commerce, and internet service providers are a few examples of industry verticals where downtime or limited scalability has significant negative impacts.

However, at the same time, these industries are also some of the most regulated due to their access to critical and sensitive information. As a result, they need data center security solutions that can offer both enterprise-grade security and scalability that matches that of the data center itself. Learn how well your data center is secured by taking this free 5-minute assessment.

Check Point offers a few hyperscale network security solutions to help companies secure their hyperscale data centers. For smaller data centers, all Check Point firewalls include built-in HA and load-balancing functionality to build HA firewall clusters with up to five nodes.

Check Point Quantum Maestro provides data center security that can scale to the largest environments. With Maestro, a single firewall cluster can handle up to 3 Terabps. Learn more about hyperscaling your data center security by signing up for a free Maestro demo today.