Researchers at McKinsey & Company reported that the pandemic has spurred digital transformation for businesses, speeding up the adoption of digital operations by 3 to 4 years. Customers and employees rely on digital processes to access products and services and conduct business during the shutdown, prompting companies to adapt or risk losing a competitive edge.
When operations go digital, the data center needs to keep up with the pace of transformation to support them.
To store and organize data while managing the digital data disruption, companies must adopt new data center infrastructure models. The 3 top options include a multi-faceted cloud environment, hyperconverged infrastructure, and software-defined data center.
Here’s a closer look at 3 ways your company can transform your data center.
1) Cloud
Cloud has long provided a popular alternative to on-premises data centers and colocations. However, more cloud models for data center are available as options today.
A private cloud is a cloud environment solely dedicated to one end user or business. Traditionally, that environment is run on-premises within the user’s firewall on infrastructure that the end user/business manages. However, private clouds have expanded into off-site owned or even rented/leased gear that the vendor owns in off-site locations, but the concept of a single dedicated customer on the infrastructure remains the same.
A public cloud is a pool of resources managed by a third party that multiple customers use concurrently. Barriers are put in place so that they do not interact with each other. With a public cloud, all infrastructure is owned by the cloud provider. Typically, the cloud provider manages the systems as well, but in some of the smaller cloud providers, you have the option to still manage your systems.
Public clouds and private clouds are set up the same way. Both use resources and technology to virtualize resources into shared pools and help enable self-service capabilities and functions to automate as much as possible. If it is sourced from dedicated systems, it is private. If it is sourced from shared systems, accessed, or potentially managed by multiple users, it is public.
If it is a combination of two or more interconnected cloud environments (public and/or private), it is hybrid cloud. A hybrid cloud deployment combines one or more public clouds with a private cloud offering or with on-premises infrastructure. Organizations gain the flexibility and innovation the public cloud provides by running certain workloads in the cloud while keeping highly sensitive data in their own data center to meet client needs or regulatory requirements.
Multicloud refers to using multiple public clouds concurrently. A hybrid cloud can also be a multicloud deployment.
When deciding which cloud deployment a customer should move forward with, a number of factors come into play: cost, security, performance, flexibility, control, and ease of use, to name a few.
For businesses that have high regulatory requirements or standards and need a tightly controlled, secure environment, a private or hybrid deployment is often the best option. For clients that need near-unlimited scalability or on-demand resources they can spin up and down as needed, public cloud is the best option. When vendor lock-in and reliability are concerns, a multicloud strategy begins to make a lot of sense. Every customer is different, but this gives a good general idea of some use cases for general cloud purposes.
2) Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)
Legacy data center infrastructures create data silos that prevent businesses from accessing the full view of the customer and company data needed to make informed decisions. HCI eliminates silos by converging the entire data center stack (compute, storage, storage networking) into a software-centric architecture that runs on either an appliance or commodity hardware. This stack enables customers to start small and scale almost infinitely.
With HCI, all critical business functions run on the software layer instead of relying on the hardware to perform tasks, enabling many companies to automate many of their data center functions. Data also can be automatically tiered, deduplicated, and compressed, as the software pools the underlying resources to allocate them to VMs or containers.
HCI is built and based on many of the same principles as today’s public cloud, enabling IT organizations to build private clouds in their own data centers while gaining all the benefits of a “cloud computing” model. Many HCI platforms also can be extended into public clouds for a hybrid cloud model that is deployed and managed with the same single pane of glass for a private, hybrid, or multicloud platform.
Legacy data center infrastructures create data silos that prevent businesses from accessing the full view of the customer and company data needed to make informed decisions. HCI eliminates silos by converging the entire data center stack (compute, storage, storage networking) into a software-centric architecture that runs on either an appliance or commodity hardware. This stack enables customers to start small and scale almost infinitely.
With HCI, all critical business functions run on the software layer instead of relying on the hardware to perform tasks, enabling many companies to automate many of their data center functions. Data also can be automatically tiered, deduplicated, and compressed, as the software pools the underlying resources to allocate them to VMs or containers.
HCI is built and based on many of the same principles as today’s public cloud, enabling IT organizations to build private clouds in their own data centers while gaining all the benefits of a “cloud computing” model. Many HCI platforms also can be extended into public clouds for a hybrid cloud model that is deployed and managed with the same single pane of glass for a private, hybrid, or multicloud platform.
3) Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC)
Like HCI, SDDC transforms every part of the data center infrastructure, from storage to networking. With SDDC, companies get optimal performance from commodity hardware by using software to abstract functionality and management from the hardware layer.
Intelligent systems manage the entire data center environment, automating many key functions. Policies can be set for data and network management to balance workloads and enforce data governance and security across the business.
SDDC can also lay the foundation for moving to a hybrid or multicloud strategy. It can be used to migrate to the cloud, manage the cloud, or optimize an overall cloud strategy.
Digital Transformation Is Here to Stay
McKinsey found that companies that have made the biggest shift towards digital transformation during the pandemic are most likely to embrace the change long term. For example, over a third of organizations reported increasing migration of assets to the cloud, and more than half of these organizations believe this trend will continue.
If your business wants to keep up with the pace of digital transformation, you should partner with ProActive Solutions. ProActive offers all the latest options for data center transformation, providing leading cloud, hyperconverged infrastructure, and software-defined data center technologies, such as Nutanix, Dell EMC, VMware, and HPE.
ProActive’s consultative approach ensures that your company makes the right decision about what path to take when transforming your data center.
Explore hyperconverged infrastructure and software-defined data center. Get your copy of the ProActive Solutions eBook The Complete Guide to Software-Defined Everything.
