Pretoria, 09 Jul 2009
Following continued success within the data centre and storage sectors, IT services and solutions provider, Datacentrix, is addressing data centre network infrastructure needs as well as the optimisation of the links into the data centre, in order to provide local organisations with a complete networking solution through its Networking Solutions business unit.
Says Duncan van Jaarsveld, networking business unit manager at Datacentrix: "With our focus on the data centre and the bulk of our business lying within data centre infrastructure, enabling storage, replication and backup solutions, Datacentrix has become increasingly aware of the issue of connectivity to the data centre.
"Application acceleration, data centre consolidation, virtualisation, data replication and disaster recovery are all dependant on performance versus cost. Bandwidth is just one element of what affects the speeds of a network, with latency being the main culprit in terms of protocol behaviour."
In the current economic environment, companies are forced to reduce capital expenditure associated with IT infrastructure and by the same token, increase capacity and performance. Virtualisation and consolidation of servers are proven solutions, but in order to enable these solutions, the network layer must be optimised.
Another significant factor in the move towards optimisation is the distribution of access to information and data, in order to have it as close to the users and clients as possible, and this includes mobile users. Historically, companies dealt with these problem areas without much success by adding branch servers and bandwidth, both of which keep increasing operational costs.
Van Jaarsveld believes that in order to effectively address these challenges, organisations need to undertake a number of steps, beginning with the optimisation of transmission control protocol (TCP) behaviour to improve speeds of transmissions. In addition, a company would need to reduce network latency to speed up the rate of processing and to decrease the amount of duplicate data travelling across the WAN link.
"Most organisations have a similar business issue to deal with, where the same data is repeatedly requested across the WAN link by users based at remote or branch offices, creating a bottleneck within the networking infrastructure and causing degradation of the network.
"By looking at optimisation technologies, a company can ensure that only the 'delta' information, or information that has been updated since the last request, is sent through to users leading to a substantial decrease in network traffic. The result is data reduction and better application response times," he explains.
Through its established Networking Solutions business unit, Datacentrix offers the technical solutions needed to drive down costs, improve service delivery and meet compliance requirements. In fact, the group recently deployed a WAN optimisation solution to a local customer's 300-plus nationwide sites and has proved a ROI within the first year for the entire project.
"The Networking Solutions business unit has aligned itself with vendors at the forefront of this type of technology in order to deliver the required specialised solutions and services focused specifically around data centre environments," states Van Jaarsveld.
"Datacentrix has been delivering solutions which assist South African companies in achieving efficient network utilisation and increasing the application response experience. We strive to be the partner of choice and help businesses meet these requirements."
Share