Remodelling your data centre for digital transformation

At the heart of digital transformation (DX) lies the data centre (DC), which continues to serve as an invisible base of operations to run the crucial backend services powering everything from mobile apps to corporate business systems. Yet traditional deployment cycles of weeks and months are too slow, and organisations must rethink their infrastructure to deliver the speed and agility that they need.

In response to these changing circumstances, many enterprises are turning to private clouds to boost efficiency and eliminate delays, and simultaneously gain greater control and visibility over available IT resources. Instead of purchasing individual server and storage units, they are turning to converged and hyperconverged hardware to rapidly roll out the capacity that they need.

Of course, the latest generations of IT infrastructure are also more power-hungry than before, and the onus is on enterprises to ensure that their colocation providers can support the higher-density deployments. Having adequate cooling capacity is equally important, as installing additional cooling hardware can incur both financial costs and delays.

Basic reliability must be ensured, in terms of both connectivity and power reliability. This is offered through diverse fibre optic pathways into the DC, as well as enough power generators and fuel reserves to ride out prolonged blackouts. The reputation of colocation providers matters too, considering that the majority of IT failures stem from human mistakes.

It makes sense to establish this future-ready foundation within a highly secure facility that is protected from unauthorised intruders, forcible attempts at entry and terrorism, or the like. A proper multi-layered strategy will typically include reinforced perimeter fencing and vehicular crash-proof gates on the outside, and advanced biometric systems on the inside to thwart attempts at impersonation.

Organisations need to think deeper about how their data centres will anchor their multi-cloud strategy, and whether their existing facilities have what it takes. By establishing a private cloud powered by modern composable infrastructure, enterprises gain highly fluid resource allocation that lets them deploy “infrastructure as code”. Compute, storage, and network devices are available as a pool of resources that can be provisioned and unallocated as necessary. This offers greater optimisation of IT resources than before, delivering heightened flexibility and cloud-like agility in IT deployments. New services can be launched at any time, or old ones scaled up or down to mirror fluctuations in demand.

Importantly, resources can be tweaked to closely match actual requirements for superior efficiency. Everything is controlled through a management layer that works as a single pane of glass, ensuring that compute-heavy workloads get the CPU that they need, while a less-used service can have its resources released back into the pool without impact on performance. Legacy or high-performance services running on bare metal hardware can also be managed together.

By adopting this new approach to infrastructure, attention can hence focus on developing and deploying new capabilities to keep pace with the competition. Enterprises can rapidly roll out new capabilities as soon as they are ready and iterate as necessary, instead of being held back by resource limitations or slow-moving procurement cycles.

The final key to optimising the data centre for digital transformation success lies with the wide-area network or WAN. For all the efficiency gains within the data centre, the need to deliver IT services to remote workers or customers makes the network an unavoidable and vital linchpin of digital transformation.

Fortunately, the technology capabilities offered by software-defined networking (SDN) have given rise to software-defined WAN (SD-WAN), which gives enterprises the ability to connect offices, data centres and public cloud together. Powered by SDN, autonomous routing and self-healing ensure high reliability and redundancy, while bandwidth can be provisioned and made available within minutes and charged according to usage. Indeed, the right SD-WAN solution can open the door to advanced hybrid cloud deployments with the use of private networks to top public cloud platforms for unmatched scalability.

Additionally, organisations can tap into a carrier-friendly data centre service provider’s advanced SDN platform to instantly access a wide breadth of rich networking capabilities provisioned through a single link. Such a capability will allow enterprises to move their workloads between multiple data centres and various cloud services seamlessly, eliminating the need for complex interconnection and traditional network procurement.

By leveraging a private cloud built using a composable infrastructure on top of a rock-solid data centre and pairing it with SD-WAN capabilities, enterprises can focus on their business rather than manage ICT complexities. The private hybrid cloud infrastructure will allow for expansion in real-time, scaling ICT resources to meet new/changing needs as companies transform digitally. By eliminating the need to work with multiple vendors, such as private cloud setup will accelerate time-to-market and deliver next-generation services that are more efficient, service-oriented, and responsive to business needs than before. Interested to find out where you might be on a DX maturity roadmap?

Contact us to learn what to do with your data centre infrastructure to meet digital transformation requirements.