The Stratta Group

The Internet and the World Wide Web infrastructures continue to be challenging networking and computing environments to “secure”. Much effort from private and public sources is continually being applied to improve the security of the infrastructure. Simultaneously, organizations have become increasingly more dependent on the infrastructure and its applications as a primary means of communication and commerce. Periodically, a virus or some such harmful application is released into the infrastructure causing large-scale outages and/or significant services degradation. One reason that such events continue to be harmful is that implementing a secure data center infrastructure is complex and expensive, requiring sophisticated systems and highly skilled personnel to design, implement and manage. This paper introduces the concept of data center virtualization, combining virtual machines and virtual Local Area Networks to implement highly secure data centers that dramatically lower both the complexity and cost of implementation. The Data Center in a Box concept is motivated and experiences in implementing multiple reference implementations are shared