EDITOR ’ S QUESTION
IAN JANSEN VAN RENSBURG , SENIOR SYSTEMS ENGINEER AND VMWARE IN SUB SHARAN AFRICA
hen referring to data centre resilience ,
W one can investigate many aspects of a data centre – physical room , cooling , power , security , networking , hardware , etc . What I would like to focus on are the software components .
Largely , thanks to virtualisation and the emergence of cloud , data centre architectures have shifted from being hardware-centric to software-controlled . Compute , network and storage virtualisation ( software-defined data centre ) has transformed the corporate data centre into a more fluid , efficient platform for business applications . The software-defined data centre that can be seamlessly linked to several mega cloud providers has delivered great benefits to the IT organisation , including reduced capital spending , higher asset utilisation and enhanced IT productivity . Virtual machines ( now also with container technology and managed by Kubernetes ) continue to be a foundational technology for modern data centre and cloud computing . However , some companies face the challenges of the people , processes and fast-changing technology required to support the technical and organisational changes within their organisation itself . Data centre leaders need to focus on the following to increase their data centre resilience :
Training and driving skills for IT staff and developers , along with innovation : Despite the new modern data centres being software-defined , automated and self-healing , the human aspect will always be there . Teams need to be skilled and experienced to support and operationalise the modern data centre .
Optimised IT and staffing spend : Maximising the utilisation of the physical infrastructure greatly increases the value of IT and staff investments while minimising IT spending . Virtualisation ensures optimal use with fewer physical resources , resulting in the IT staff spending less time on physical maintenance activities .
Increased IT infrastructure simplicity : Because SDDC is configured and assigned granularly through policies , organisations can either alter policies or apply a new policy to adjust capabilities to meet new business demands automatically .
Accelerated time to value : Automated provisioning and management of key resources can drive business value . Agility in IT allows the organisation to respond quickly to changes in the
MAXIMISING THE UTILISATION OF THE PHYSICAL INFRASTRUCTURE GREATLY INCREASES THE VALUE OF IT AND STAFF INVESTMENTS WHILE MINIMISING IT SPENDING .
marketplace . Modern , cloud-native applications require modern architecture and operations . Traditional data centre approaches to IT , whether in architecture or operations , will neither scale nor provide the agility that businesses need as they adopt private and hybrid cloud . When an SDDC is properly deployed , the value propositions of the technology are truly impressive . www . intelligentdatacentres . com
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