Practices

The heartbeat of any organization is in the data center. Employees, partners, and customers rely on data and resources in the Data Center to effectively connect, collaborate, and create. Over the last decade, the rise of Internet and Web-based technologies has made the data center more strategic than ever, improving productivity, enhancing business processes, and accelerating change. Data centers are the strategic focus of IT efforts to protect, optimize, and grow the organization.

How Nexus Can Assist Your Organization

Nexus collaborates with the industry leaders in data center solutions to create platforms that increase efficient expansion, provide highly available, resilient platforms, all while reducing real estate, power, and cooling costs of the data center.

At Nexus, we understand data center needs. We have been connecting organizations to their data centers for years. Some of the many data center concepts our experts focus on are:

• Virtualization
• Replication
• Thin Provisioning
• Backup
• Recovery
• Archiving
• High Availability
• Power
• Cooling

Virtualization
Data center virtualization is the basis for the transformation of the data center into a service-oriented infrastructure and a key enabler for automation and lights-out operations.

By virtualizing data center infrastructure and decoupling applications and data from the physical resources they run on, IT can deliver and maintain data center services more efficiently, resiliently, and dynamically.

The network plays a central role in enabling data center virtualization across server, storage and network domains, and is central to the architecture roadmap.

Benefits

• Lower total cost of ownership (TCO): Data center virtualization helps IT achieve higher utilization rates and power efficiency, greater operating efficiency, and lower capital costs.
• Improved resilience: The abstraction offered by data center virtualization enables non-disruptive planned downtime and more rapid recovery from unplanned disruptions.
• Greater agility: A fully orchestrated virtualized infrastructure can respond quickly to new application demands and service requirements because IT is not constrained by a predetermined relationship between services and physical hardware.

Replication
Data Center Replication architecture technology provides data currency and consistency. This technology protects against both local and wide-area disasters by simultaneously supporting short-distance synchronous replication and long-distance asynchronous replication emanating from the same source volume.

Benefits

• Maintaining more efficient data currency. Using synchronous replication over a short distance in a campus or metropolitan area cluster provides the highest level of data currency without undue impact to application performance.
• Permitting swift recovery. A campus/metropolitan cluster implementation allows for fast automated failovers after a local area disaster with minimal to no transaction loss.
• Permitting recovery even when a disaster exceeds traditional regional boundaries. A wide-area disaster could disable data centers in some locations, but with some manual interaction, operations can be shifted to another data center and continue after the disaster.
• Shifting to staffing outside the disaster area. A wide-area disaster also affects people located within the disaster area, both professionally and personally. By moving operations out of the region to a remotely located recovery data center, operational responsibilities shift to people not directly affected by the disaster.

Thin Provisioning
Thin provisioning is a model for automatically allocating physical storage resources as needed to address the root technical pressures behind over provisioning—nearly eliminating the time IT administrators spend manually provisioning and allocating storage capacity to applications. Thin provisioning works with all applications—but is used optimally when an agreement can be made about storage consumption needs between the application administrator and the storage administrator—to ensure physical storage is always available as needed. Thin provisioning can take storage virtualization to the next logical step.

Benefits

• Helps simplify management and improve productivity because IT staff members need to monitor fewer storage devices than with physical provisioning.
• Helps reduce or eliminate time spent reprovisioning volumes to deal with changing storage requirements—which in turn enhances the productivity of end users, because minimized reprovisioning helps reduce server and application downtime.

Backup & Recovery
Data Center Backup and Recovery solutions enable you to strengthen your data protection, streamline backup and recovery, and meet a wide range of service levels, even for the largest data volumes. You’ll also reduce the amount of data to be backed up while optimizing your environment with a full range of platform, software, and subscription-based service solutions.

Benefits

• Faster backup and restores — Meet more aggressive backup windows, and restore your key applications in minutes, not days.
• Reduced backup windows — Minimize backup windows to reduce impact on your application and system availability.
• Reduced business risk — Restore data quickly and accurately with built-in hardware redundancy and RAID protection.
• More control — Protect key data with policy-based management of information retention and deletion.
• Improved IT efficiency — Save hours of staff time and boost user productivity.
• Reduced costs — Match infrastructure costs with changing information value via efficient, cost-effective tiered storage or low-cost monthly subscription services.

Archiving
Archiving solutions minimize risk, control costs, and increase content reuse. Now you can focus on what matters most—active production information. With Archiving solutions, you can apply common archiving services—such as retention, distribution, and security—across a variety of content types, while automating data movement to the most appropriate tier of storage. The result is secure archived data at the lowest total cost.

Benefits

• Online access — Improve information access by keeping data online and readily accessible and reusable.
• Unchanged data archiving — Speed backup and recovery processes by archiving unchanged data.
• Process automation — Save time and money and enable rapid information retrieval with automated archiving processes.
• Regulatory compliance — Preserve important documents, e-mails, and other critical data according to internal rules and external regulations.
• Storage efficiency — Reclaim terabytes of storage capacity by migrating older or infrequently accessed data from primary systems to more cost-effective archival storage.

High Availability
The goal of High Availability is to provide continuous access to applications, data, and content anywhere, anytime by addressing every potential cause of downtime with functionality, design, or best practice. Network hardware and software work together, providing functionality across the three broad areas of high availability: System Level Resiliency, Network Level Resiliency, and Embedded Management

Power
It is clear that IT managers need new ways to reduce power as they increase data center performance. Blade servers are a key server consolidation and infrastructure management technology whose deployment can deliver the needed increase in performance while giving data center managers new ways to cut power consumption and costs.

It may seem counterintuitive. Blade servers pack more horsepower into smaller chassis and enable a greater concentration of compute power in the data center. With multiple, highly compact blade servers, a single blade server chassis can deliver more compute resources than racks of individual server towers or rows of server racks. But this increased density can translate into higher power consumption per square foot. How does one get around this physical limitation? Besides adopting blade server architectures in the data center, it takes smarter planning, superior power management tools and effective utilization of advanced new technologies such as virtualization.

Cooling
The power required to cool IT equipment in your data center far exceeds the power required to run that equipment.  Overall power in the data center is fast reaching capacity as well and an obvious area that needs to be addressed is implementing cooling best practices where ever possible and utilization of in-row cooling to address hot spots. Greater attention to energy efficiency and consumption is critical.

To optimize the cooling in your data center a good first step is an in-depth analysis of your current environment to gain a holistic understanding of your data center’s environment, increased Awareness of your critical risk factors, benchmark of performance metrics, and generate a punch list of opportunities for cooling improvement.

Data Center Partnerships

We leverage these concepts to build a custom data center strategy for your business. We leverage manufacturers such as:
 

• Cisco
• EMC2
• VMware
• Liebert
• Compellent
• Microsoft
• Dell
• APC
• Hewlett Packard
• EqualLogic

Nexus offers infrastructure architecture that allows organizations to protect critical applications and confidential data, enhance data center operational efficiencies, and rapidly create new secure application environments to support new business processes. This allows organizations to invest more resources in IT initiatives that fuel growth through a consistent network foundation that enables substantial cost reductions in sustaining existing applications.

Every Advanced Technology, One Partner

The addition of this practice differentiates Nexus as one of the few Cisco partners that can deliver all Advanced Technologies to your customers. You no longer need multiple partners for your one customer.

• Unified Communications
• Data Protection
• Collaboration
• Data Center
• Contact Center
• Mobility
• Infrastructure
• Managed Services

Now more than ever, Nexus can be the only Advanced Technology partner you will ever need!

Nexus knows how all advanced technologies interoperate and actively promotes the growth of one technology to another.

Additional Information

To learn more about our Data Center as well as any of our other Advanced Technology practices, please contact your local Nexus Account Manager or click here.

Resources

Below are helpful documents you can view regarding Data Center:

• ESG Report - Cisco, EMC, and VMware Ignite the Cloud Marketplace Whitepaper (PDF)