Redefining data centres to meet today’s global challenges

Data centres have evolved rapidly in the last few years to keep pace with changing user expectations. Within the enterprise, modern data centre management is a constant balancing act that requires rapid responses to new business opportunities and careful management of existing infrastructure costs. Choosing infrastructure platforms that can meet both needs is critical for successful IT organizations.

Cloud is also a huge trend sweeping data centres. Many teams are turning to cloud- style data centre deployments to be able to rapidly deploy new services and consolidate existing infrastructure for the best return on investment. Platforms designed for cloud infrastructure promise to accelerate business results faster than traditional standalone server, network and storage implementations.

Implementing successful cloud infra- structure requires more than state- of-the art data centre technologies such as fast wide-area networks, powerful servers, immense storage capacities, and pervasive high-performance virtualization. It calls for an end-to- end technology vision.

Thousands of customers are moving towards vendors who can deliver a focused enterprise data centre portfolio designed around the principle of hardware and software engineered to work together. They can expect an optimized enterprise stack that can reduce risk, deliver leading performance, and simplify deployment and management. In today's world, hardware working closely with software offers extreme performance, unmatched in the industry.

Organizations already using innovative technology enjoy a degree of investment protection unparalleled in the industry. Over 50,000 businesses and institutions run over 11,000 certified applications on these technologies today. Moving existing infrastructure onto the latest operating system and hardware platforms is greatly simplified by the combination of binary compatibility and flexible virtualization technologies.

Virtualization and cloud computing have become increasingly important as a means to increase flexibility and support growing business requirements for new IT services. Many organizations have deployed virtualized IT infrastructures based on x86 servers to take advantage of lower costs and open architecture that enables a choice of vendors for software components such as operating system, virtualization software, and management tools.

Even though many businesses have already undertaken some level of consolidation or virtualisation, there is often potential to extend the benefits across much more of their IT infrastructure. Consolidation and virtualisation provide a range of advantages, but they also help businesses to move towards realising the additional cost savings and agility improvements that cloud computing offers.

Virtualisation can generate cost and operational benefits in excess of those offered by consolidation alone. By enabling the sharing of IT resources across a business, virtualisation can greatly increase utilization levels and significantly improve return on investment.

Virtualization is a key technology used in datacentres to optimize resources. As IT needs continue to evolve, virtualization can no longer be regarded as an isolated technology to solve a single problem. Many companies started the optimization journey by using server virtualization to consolidate systems and reduce capital expenditure (CAPEX). With IT staff now tasked to deliver on- demand services, data centre virtualization requirements have gone well beyond simple consolidation and CAPEX re- duction. To be able to consolidate effectively, new systems must have the performance, capacity, security, and scalability to support expected performance levels for targeted applications- even as applications change and grow over time.

The foundation of a mission- critical cloud must combine agility, flexibility, and security with scale and performance, e.g. Oracle Solaris possesses all of the attributes required to power the most demanding enterprise clouds. Built-in virtualization, ease of deployment for applications, and workload mobility are base-line requirements. More importantly, control of these capabilities must be achieved across large pools of compute and storage resources. For compliance purposes, ease of monitoring and reporting are likewise necessary.

With software and hardware designed and tested to work together, overall system management gets dramatically easier. Performance and availability increase, at the same time that costs and deployment times decrease. This unique ability provides an added advantage to vendors which have their software and hardware products engineered, tested, packaged, certified, deployed, supported, and upgraded together.

For some companies, advancing to the next- generation data centre involves moving business content out of legacy applications and platforms and into versatile, more- cost- effective IT environments. The goal is to retain existing application assets by transforming them to modern languages, databases, and services.

By aligning your data centre goals of high availability, less complexity, and lower costs with the overall goals of your business, you have a data centre that's on track to handle the challenges of today and can grow with your business to take advantage of opportunities to come.