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Data Center Modernization – The Agile Data Movement

by Deepak Patel, posted on Tuesday, June 24, 2014

I am always excited to meet customers, especially architects and thought leaders who have been tasked with solving IT challenges that span the entire data center. In my most recent discussions with some of our e-commerce and healthcare customers, there has been one reoccurring theme – “data center modernization.” These customers have slightly different views on what is required, but the consensus is clear – today’s data centers are too rigid and stale, and there is a clear lack of agility in many tiers.

E-commerce customers seem to believe that the networking components are the easiest to consolidate and modernize with vendor solutions around SDN and ADC virtualization. Healthcare organizations, on the other hand, are catching up on the networking tier, but are ahead on the storage front, given their HIPPA compliance needs around data security and a business model requiring multi-tenancy.

The small/medium enterprises appear to be the most agile and ahead of the game despite the fact that they do not have any data centers of their own. I had one of the most interesting conversations with an IT architect leading the charge at a logistics firm that is experiencing hyper growth. He had mandated the automation (enduring much pain and agony during implementation) of every aspect of their infrastructure and had also moved it to the cloud. His vision and strategy proved to be spot-on when one of the data centers (region in a cloud) had a major outage. His team was able to restore normal operations within minutes, with minimal to no impact on the logistics business.

The two powerful initiatives – automation of operations and migration to the cloud – saved the day for the logistics company and have become a gift that keeps on giving. Now, with the logistics firm expected to double their customer base over the next 12 months, scaling to meet demand is easier and more cost efficient.

The answer to “what is data center modernization?” may not be clear to some IT professionals. To some, it is building a private cloud or virtualizing every tier. Ultimately, the goal of the data center modernization initiative at a large enterprise is to achieve agility of IT infrastructure to better handle disaster recovery, availability, and scale – just like the logistics firm.

Throughout the trip, it was becoming clear that the agile data center revolution had taken off at the larger enterprises with budgeted initiatives and concrete plans being finalized. IT has become an essential part of most organizations’ business strategy and is being practiced now more than ever. ScaleArc is an enabler of the agile data center moment and proud to be a huge part of the customer’s success story – delivering availability, agility, and scalability at the data tier.

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