Redefining data centre economics

Data centres have evolved rapidly in the past 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 organisations. 

Cloud computing is also a huge trend sweeping data centres. Many teams are turning to cloud-style data-centre deployments to be able to deploy new services rapidly 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 infrastructure 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 virtualisation. 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 optimised 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. 

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.

 

Ron Goh is Asean vice president for systems sales at Oracle Corporation.