The demands of the Datacenter are increasingly challenging
Applications need to be available at all times. Power and cooling demands are exceeding capacity. As infrastructure becomes more complex, administration has become a 24x7 task – pushing staff to its limits. Patches, security updates and application updates make scheduled maintenance extremely complicated.
In today's Datacenter, operational demands are increasing. So are the needs for performance, scalability and reliability. As data grows, companies require more analysis tools and computing power. Financial concerns also affect IT decisions more than ever. Companies want low-risk solutions to simplify data center operations. They want to keep management and support costs at a reasonable level. And, they want to be confident that today’s methods will be compatible with future growth plans.
New ways of operating data centers have emerged, yet IT departments want proof these new solutions make solid economic sense. The right infrastructure creates a balance between a company’s requirements for scalability, availability, security, management and cost effective integration and operation.
The IT Challenge
Business opportunities lead to growth, some planned, some unplanned. Either way, the challenge remains the same – deliver more with less. Bring the costs down in the Datacenter and provide performance as well as scalability. A Datacenter’s infrastructure design must be simple, reliable, scalable and economical.
Simplify
The average Datacenter has grown extremely complex because of new technologies, fast growth, acquisitions and data explosion from diverse business applications. Consolidation and/or virtualization can reduce equipment costs, improve server utilization, cut the datacenter footprint and simplify administration.
Reliability
Providing continuous operation under all foreseeable circumstances such as power outages, equipment breakdown and human error is the goal of most Datacenters. Designing architectures with redundancy in mind goes a long way in making a Datacenter reliable. The design of infrastructure components is also extremely important. Designs that allow easy access for repairs and provide remote administration features are essential.
Scalability
Scaling IT with the business is a major challenge. As a result, most businesses have seen an explosion in the amount of data that it must process, store, protect, and manage. Infrastructure must be scalable to meet these demands. Scalability can be accomplished in different ways: horizontally, (adding servers) vertically, (adding CPU, memory or I/O) or both. Some services, such as databases, only scale to a certain degree horizontally, requiring that vertical resources be optimized.
Cost
In today’s Datacenter, reducing IT costs is an ongoing priority. The costs associated with power, cooling, administration and maintenance can add up to a significant part of any IT budget. A simple, reliable and scalable design can reduce costs by providing an easy to manage, well-utilized, high performance, and highly availableinfrastructure.
Our Expertise
dcVAST Solution Architects and Engineers have a breadth of experience managing today’s server based computing environments. Our five-step process brings the expertise necessary to provide a cost effective, scalable, server based computing infrastructure.
- Assess
- Design
- Build
- Support
- Manage
For more information on Server-based computing, please click the following links:
Server Consolidation and Virtualization Practice Brief
High Availability Practice Brief