Transforming the data centre

At the start of 2013, CIOs cited the following areas among the top 10 business priorities - reducing enterprise costs; improving IT applications and infrastructure; improving efficiency; and improving business processes (Gartner Executive Program Survey 2013).

Against this backdrop, many enterprise CIOs today are centralising storage and backups to their core data centres, instead of allowing remote and branch offices to maintain the hardware and data. This makes sense for the sake of simplicity and ensures IT managers adopt a hands-on approach to device management, which mitigates the security risk and complexity of having multiple backup systems and dispersed data sets.

Adding to this sentiment, companies with offices in sometimes unstable locations may not want any locally stored data in those offices, due to security concerns and potential data breaches.

A significant driver for many companies interested in storage consolidation, however, is cost. Companies want to maximise their investments in storage area networks and realise the benefits of centralised storage. Chief among those benefits is achieving lower IT costs by eliminating the need to purchase and maintain local storage and server hardware. A new concept, which bridges this gap, is storage delivery technology.

CIOs are realising that core business priorities can be addressed and solved, but they need to start by addressing core IT processes and transforming the data centre.

As part of this movement, IT managers can expand capacity and look to extend the benefits of a consolidated approach to larger branch offices and data-intensive applications that previously were difficult or impossible to consolidate.

Consolidation has the potential to empower businesses of all sizes to remove servers and data from branch offices and centralise them in the secure data centre - without sacrificing user experience. This new architectural approach makes it possible to centralise backup operations and remove data from high-risk locations, while increasing agility and lowering the costs of managing remote office IT. To succeed in this dynamic environment, IT leaders need agility, security and control, while business users demand performance.

With the right information, delivered at the right time and in the right place, organisations can serve customers better, make smarter decisions, and react faster to changing conditions. These elements often come together at the remote/branch office. Identifying the optimal deployment location for IT assets such as servers and supporting storage systems is one of the more challenging aspects of the IT decision process today.

When the edge of the enterprise and the core at the data centre are linked together in an integrated solution, IT organisations can centralise control, security, and protection of distributed server and storage assets while ensuring timely access to (or recovery of) data and applications relied on by users across the extended organisation.

In line with the growing volumes of data, enterprises should be able to decommission branch backup and recovery systems, shifting data protection operations to the secure data centre. Enterprises are able to utilise their well-honed data centre backup and recovery systems and procedures, and skilled personnel to protect branch data.

Snapshots are an integral part to ensuring a company's IT operations are running smoothly. In today's IT environment, administrators must be able to quickly set and assign hourly, daily, or weekly storage snapshot policies to ensure application consistent data protection in conjunction with supported data centre storage arrays.

This new architectural approach makes it possible to centralise backup operations and remove data from high-risk locations.

Once storage snapshots are created in the data centre, in addition to leveraging the disk snapshot for fast recovery, many organisations use snapshots as a source for backup to secondary media such as tape or cloud storage to ensure data is located offsite.

Companies' information bases and requirements are constantly changing in response to shifting business/customer requirements.

Consolidation of systems and information at remote sites and central data centres must be seen as an ongoing, iterative process, and any system deployed, whether in the data centre or at the edge, must make this process faster and less operationally intensive now and in the future.

The key to attaining these benefits, of course, is effective implementation of solutions, including the adjustment of related processes (eg, application deployment and backup processes). A well thought-out implementation also makes it easier to expand the use of the solution into new user bases and for additional services.

Finally, a sound implementation makes it easier for an enterprise to react to changing business conditions and new application needs in line with the fast-moving IT landscape.