Every morning when I get up, there are a series of apps that I fire up to gather my daily dose of information that fuels my personal, financial, and work life. In this day and age, I need to access the data on my mobile device/smartphone or PC anywhere and at any time. For all practical purposes, I really don’t care how that information is processed behind the scenes.
Isn’t that typical of how we consume information in today’s digital transformation age? Being a technical person, I do understand how this information is produced and delivered, but most of us just want the information when we demand it – we don’t care about how it gets to us. That is, until our business is the one that must provide the data to consumers, who demand convenient access to it at all times. So, how does data get delivered to consumers’ devices of choice?
The data center as we know it consists of a bunch of servers, storage, and switches, with operating systems and software that work together in a symphony of electrical pulses over copper and fiber cables to translate data in bits and bytes (or ones and zeroes). This is what creates human-readable data that’s delivered to endpoints (devices). Organizations also build secondary data centers to mirror or replicate the primary data center for high availability, redundancy, or additional capacity in virtualized server, storage, and network environments.
Alternatively, cloud as we know it is an aggregation of all these data center components at a massive scale in a highly secure, built out campus, designed for multiple logical tenancy. In addition, hybrid data center (private data center and public cloud) architectures are becoming more prevalent today as an agile and dynamic strategy.
Let’s return to the applications that I need to have available at my fingertips as I begin each day. Today’s software-defined data centers (SDDCs) allow for applications to move from an on-premises data center to a cloud data center and back. SDDC designs and deployments ensure that workloads can move, burst, scale, and provision in an automated and orchestrated fashion to meet the varying or cyclical demands of data.
The hybrid data center can be represented as one large logical data center that has multiple underlying physical or cloud server/storage/network farms. This large logical data center is centrally managed and monitored to assure its resiliency in the face of any unwanted event or disaster. Full automation and orchestration allow for applications to live anywhere and remain accessible at any time for the demanding user like me (and most other consumers).
Large technology companies design their solution offers with the hybrid data center in mind. Specifically, the application and data must reach the user no matter where they live. As a solution architect, I have to put together the right chemistry of products and services to match the customer’s mission. Solutions that are derived from a validated reference architecture have been proven to execute on that mission 100% of the time – and businesses that do not offer services or solutions that are designed to be highly available will suffer in delivering in their mission.
In a competitive market with demanding consumers, rapid delivery of data is key to survival in each and every industry. We live in a vicious digital age where no one has patience. As a business, if you have not yet extended your traditional data center into a hybrid data center, it’s time that we sit down and talk – before it’s too late.
LEARN HOW TO SET YOUR BUSINESS UP FOR SUCCESS WITH A DATA CENTER FOUNDATION WORKSHOP
The ConvergeOne Data Center Foundation Workshop focuses on the resiliency of your data center infrastructure. During this workshop, our expert team will analyze your data center infrastructure and provide you with a consolidated list of recommendations and next steps to improve its resiliency.
Topics: Data Center
