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 business.

Data center managers face several challenges in fulfilling these goals. Most enterprise data centers grew rapidly to meet the explosive economic growth of the previous decade. Consequently, applications commonly stand alone in underutilized, isolated infrastructure silos. Each infrastructure silo is designed based on the inclination of the specific application being deployed, so that a typical data center supports a broad assortment of operating systems, computing platforms, and storage systems. The disparate infrastructures supporting different application “islands” are difficult to change or expand and expensive to manage, integrate, secure, and back up.

According to industry estimates, more than 70 percent of IT budgets are dedicated to sustaining existing application environments. Therefore, IT organizations must improve operational efficiency, optimize utilization of data center resources, and release funds for innovative new IT projects that help generate revenue. Data center managers need a resilient infrastructure that consistently protects diverse applications and services against disruptions and security attacks. The ultimate goal is an agile infrastructure that can incorporate ongoing improvements in computer, storage, networking and application technologies, and empowers IT to support changing business processes.

Organizational Benefits

An organization can derive a multitude of benefits when IT moves from its existing data center infrastructure to a state-of-the-art model that addresses the demands of today's globally competitive environment. Almost immediately, it can realize cost savings for the IT department, based on administrative efficiencies, simply by eliminating systems that are under-utilized and require high levels of management overhead, as well as operational efficiencies based on more effective use of limited facilities.

For the organization as a whole, such an infrastructure provides a variety of benefits. When data is accessible beyond departmental silos, executives can discern a clearer picture of trends and patterns in the marketplace. Overall, a consolidated infrastructure enables smoother integration of data, which in turn promotes agility, resilience, and efficiency.

How Nexus Can Assist Your Organization

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. The architecture 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.

Resources

Below are helpful documents you can view regarding Infrastructure:

• Building Disaster Recovery and Business Continuance Solutions (PDF)
• The Adaptive Architecture for the Data Center Network (PDF)