Get Ready. The New Normal is Non-stop IT.
Not too long ago your IT department was a cost center. But now it’s not just central to your business, it’s your lifeblood. And if it’s done right – IT, and the technology deployed by the IT department, is your competitive edge.
At Google, Facebook, YouTube, Amazon… the heart of the business is the technology in their data centers. For these businesses there would be no enterprise without IT, and they’ve invested billions of dollars to achieve a “Never Down” status. But it’s not just digital leviathans with billions to spend on capital expenditure that are thrusting IT onto center stage. SaaS offerings and transactions in the cloud have become ubiquitous. This 24/7/365 spotlight on IT infrastructure has galvanized enterprises to focus on new competitive opportunities.
Get Set. Finding the Missing Link.
If you take a look at your data center (or centers) you will find a labyrinth of technologies that are crucial to success in the digital enterprise – technologies like virtualization, cloud computing, web load balancing, and software-defined networking. The missing link in the data center is a technology that enables availability, scalability, and especially agility at your data tier.
Applications are still being programmed to a specific database type and version in a forced 1:1 fashion. Any application that needs to talk to any database at a given point in time has to be directly connected to that database, and the database logic and engineering is hard wired into the application, and that application is now chained to that database environment. Changes to the back-end database environment require app changes and downtime. Database upgrade projects take years. Maintenance windows to do simple things like patching require scheduled downtime, generally in the middle of the night or on a weekend, even while a global base of users still are working to access the applications. In the case of packaged apps, you don’t have control over the database engineering and database scalability; you are stuck with what the app vendor allows.
Go.
That’s why we created ScaleArc.
We recognized the requirement for non-stop IT and 24/7 availability in the data center, and that while there were a variety of technologies being developed to increase the successful operation of the presentation tier, the web tier, and the application tier, the data tier was being largely ignored. When you can drive availability, scalability, and agility to the data tier, there will be a direct correlation to your competitive edge and bottom line revenue.
The key is in database load balancing.
In my next blog I will talk more about databases, database load balancing and the inconvenient truth about databases: a forced 1:1 tie between the application and the database tier that impedes continuous availability, weakens the security paradigm, but also presents your digital enterprise with an opportunity to make a competitive leap forward.
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