The Complete Guide to Data Center Networking: Architecture, Technologies, and Operations for Modern Data Centers, Cloud Computing, and AI Infrastructu (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798174157873)

A data center can contain the world's most powerful servers, fastest GPUs, and largest storage systems-but without the network connecting them, they are isolated machines.

The Complete Guide to Data Center Networking provides a comprehensive introduction to the architectures, technologies, equipment, protocols, and operational practices that connect modern data centers and allow enormous computing systems to function as a unified infrastructure.

From traditional enterprise facilities to hyperscale cloud platforms and massive artificial-intelligence clusters, networking determines how quickly information can move, how reliably applications communicate, how infrastructure scales, and ultimately how effectively computing resources can be used.

This book takes readers from the fundamentals of computer networking to the specialized high-performance fabrics increasingly required by cloud computing, distributed systems, high-performance computing, and artificial intelligence.

The book begins with the principles required to understand what is actually happening when information moves between machines.

Readers explore concepts including:

Packets and frames. Ethernet. IP addressing. MAC addresses. TCP and UDP. Ports. Switching. Routing. VLANs. Subnets. Gateways. DNS. DHCP. Bandwidth. Throughput. Latency. Congestion. Redundancy.

Rather than presenting networking as a collection of unexplained acronyms, the book connects these concepts to the physical data-center environment and explains how they work together.

Readers learn how data travels from a server's network interface through switches and network fabrics to other servers, storage systems, external networks, cloud services, and ultimately users around the world.

Modern data-center networks must connect thousands-or potentially hundreds of thousands-of devices while maintaining enormous bandwidth and extremely high availability.

The Complete Guide to Data Center Networking examines the physical and logical architecture that makes this possible.