The Business Case for Active/Active Data Centers

The discussion around active/active data centers can dovetail into a great number of conversations, from business processes to facilities management. Before engaging in such conversations, it’s important that you begin with an understanding of the business requirements that necessitate the implementation of active/active data centers so that you can determine if such an approach will align with your data center and overall business strategies.

Business Requirements: Increased Uptime + Application Resiliency

The requirement for high levels of uptime have led users to upgrade, expand, and develop new solutions. Whether your customers are employees or external to your organization, it’s undeniable that the ability to ensure application resiliency across data centers results in a better customer experience. If improving the customer experience is not justification enough for your business, the following considerations, in particular, demonstrate the importance of increased uptime and application resiliency:

• You may experience negative revenue impact when applications or services are not available.
  
  
• If you have customers in more than one region, you must ensure that a regional disaster does not impact customers in unaffected regions.
  
  
• You may have applications or services that are required to support disaster relief efforts.

If your business only supports local/regional customers, you may not have a need for highly resilient applications in the event of a disaster. The users who would be accessing your applications or services would be impacted by the disaster, as would your business. However, if your business provides applications or services that support a disaster relief implementation, then you would need to have a resilient infrastructure.

Another consideration is whether or not you maintain your own payroll. In the event of a local disaster, your inability to process payroll can impact your employees when they need access to funds the most. These examples point to the need to review your business processes from top to bottom to ensure your business can survive and thrive in the event of a disaster.

The Path to Data Center Resiliency

Data center resiliency will necessitate staffing to support the additional data centers. For instance, a small company that’s increasing infrastructure complexity will require two to three times the number of IT staff. Locating and qualifying highly technical staff can take months—assuming that they are even available in your region. Depending upon the infrastructure’s complexity, you may also have to leverage existing office space, acquire a new office, or collocate them in the new data center. If this sounds daunting, then a better option may be to partner with a managed services provider like ConvergeOne. Managed services can resolve extensive staff and infrastructure issues when you lack the resources to handle them in-house.

It’s important to note that you should not confuse data center resiliency and uptime with data backup. Data backup is a separate consideration. Regardless of your business’s application resiliency needs, you must have a reliable method for maintaining differential, read-only backups in multiple sites. This will ensure that your data is always protected and allow for recovery from disasters, corruptions, and malware attacks.

Next Steps

The business case for active/active data centers hinges upon the need to have your applications and services remain highly available. This need may arise from a desire to improve the customer experience, protect your business from disasters, or prevent negative revenue impact from limited availability or service disruptions. If any of these considerations apply to your business, you will need to review your native resiliency capabilities or plan for third-party solutions.

 
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EXPLORING THE MODERN DATA CENTER

Is your data center keeping up with your digital transformation demands?

ConvergeOne's Data Center Experts have written a guide that provides valuable insights about how you can strategically design your data center infrastructure to power the technology of tomorrow. The following areas are explored:

• Digital Transformation

• Data Protection

• Active/Active Data Centers

• Converged Architecture

• Hyper-Converged Infrastructure

• Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI)