Infrastructure is the stage. This layer is the performance.
Compute, storage and network are the reason a data center exists. The power, cooling and security layers are all in service of keeping these systems available. How you specify them depends entirely on the workload — a virtualization cluster, a storage-heavy archive and an AI training farm have very different needs.
Compute & AI
Servers come as rack-mount, blade or hyperconverged nodes. The big shift is AI: GPU servers draw far more power and heat per rack than traditional compute, which forces changes in power density and cooling. Planning IT and facility layers together — not separately — is now essential.
| Compute | Dell, HPE, Lenovo, Cisco UCS, Supermicro, IBM, Huawei |
|---|---|
| AI / GPU | NVIDIA (DGX), Supermicro, Dell, HPE |
Storage & network
Storage ranges from all-flash arrays for performance to high-capacity systems for archives. Networking — switches, routers, firewalls and load balancers — ties it all together and to the outside world, with security appliances guarding the perimeter.
| Storage | Dell, NetApp, HPE, Pure Storage, Hitachi Vantara, IBM |
|---|---|
| Network | Cisco, Juniper, Arista, HPE Aruba, Huawei, Extreme |
| Security & access | Palo Alto, Fortinet, Check Point (firewalls); F5, Citrix (load balancers); Raritan, Vertiv/Avocent, ATEN (KVM) |
How it scales
| Small | A few servers, simple storage, a single switch pair. |
|---|---|
| Medium | Virtualized clusters, shared storage, redundant network fabric. |
| Large | Large clusters, GPU farms, spine-leaf fabric, dedicated storage tiers. |