Thinking Digital Transformation? Think Data Center Modernization & Infrastructure Agility

Authored by Amit Luthra, Director & GM - Storage & CI Sales, India Commercial, Dell EMC

Technology-led transformation is sweeping across industries. To capture emerging revenue streams, create high-end products, provide an enhanced customer experience, and solve various social challenges, organizations are increasingly embracing digital and IT transformation. And at the core of their transformation journey lies the modern data center. 

Unlike the legacy IT ecosystem, the modern data center helps organizations transform their IT infrastructure and eliminate all the glitches related to legacy as well as outdated systems. So, it’s quite safe to say that an appropriate IT infrastructure forms the cornerstone of the modern data center. After all, when your data center can support more and more digital strategies, your business will able to support new initiatives, leveraging the capabilities of your IT ecosystem. 

As a note, if you aim to create a modern data center on the back of modern storage, consider the following things: 

• All Flash: More efficiency in all-flash solutions: When it comes to your data center design, all-flash solutions have a positive impact on it. Flash drastically cuts the costs of providing consistent as well as predictable low-latency performance. Further, it also lessens power consumption, floor space, and cooling requirements, which are required to provide outstanding storage services backed by a no-compromise approach. 
  
  At Dell EMC, our top-end PowerMax all-flash array is aimed at catering to next-generation applications, comprising real-time analytics, artificial intelligence, mobile applications, IoT, and genomics. What distinguishes PowerMax is the fact that it was built for industry-standard components, comprising NVMe media. 

• Cloud-enabled: Prepare your data center for hybrid: Hybrid cloud is a dominant factor in the design of a data center and its integration with the cloud. According to Gartner, more than $1 trillion of IT spending is likely to be affected, directly or indirectly, by the shift to cloud over the next five years. A well-run hybrid cloud experience; however, demands a rapid transformation of technology as well as IT operations. Some organizations approach this transformation through phases, while some prefer accelerating the entire process at once, with the aim to transform as rapidly as possible. 
  
  To facilitate the second approach, we, at Dell EMC, have introduced the Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution, which is an amalgamation of hardware, software, and services that can help businesses take advantages from hybrid cloud services within 28 days. 

•  Software Defined Part 1: Edge Data Center in Vogue: The edge is not meant to replace the cloud. Rather, edge solutions are designed to complement data center and cloud services. With a steady increase in the volume as well as velocity of data, there will be an increase in the inefficiency of streaming all this information to a cloud or data center for processing.
  
  I strongly swear by thefact that edge, WAN, and SD-WAN solutions are going to leave a profound impact on the deployment of data centers in the digital world. 

• Software Defined Part 2: Focus on converged technologies: Converged technologies remove all the siloes of resources, challenges related to administration, and various issues regarding scale. Like all-flash solutions, converged and hyper-converged infrastructure (CI and HCI) are built to add more simplicity to the data center design, thereby enabling businesses to gain more agility.
  
  Over the years, the converged systems market has derived great benefits from the expansion to new environments, targeting a new set of customers. This expansion is mainly driven by all the products that provide whole new levels of automation, software-defined solutions on the back of scale-out architectures, and deeper integration between technologies. Further, HCI and CI designs can easily getintegrated into edge and all-flash services, paving the way for easier data center operation.
  
  At Dell EMC, we have made a niche for ourselves in the converged infrastructure market. We have enabled one of Canada's largest transmission companies to meet increased power demand with Vblock. Shifting to a Converged Infrastructure on a Dell EMC Vblock System simplified the company's operations and empowered it to offer reliable services to customers. 

• Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning: Driving performance for AI/ML workloads in the data center: Today’s AI and ML workloads demand high-end performance and capacity to manage as well as analyze all structured and unstructured data within the least possible time, thereby providing consistent and rapid results that come up with a competitive advantage for the organization.
  
  Given this aspect of AI and ML in data center modernization, we, at Dell EMC, have recently introduced two new four-socket servers—the PowerEdge R940xa and PowerEdge R840, part of the 14th generation Dell EMC PowerEdge server portfolio. Backed by the outstanding performance density of Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors and massive memory, these new servers deliver powerful performance, enabling you to: transform data insights into business outcomes rapidly and drive faster insights. Further, leveraging next-generation PowerMax storage solution—builtwith a machine learning engine, customers now can make autonomous storage a reality. 

• Security: Integrating trust at every level of the modern data center: With the modern data center and the entire process of digital transformation comes a growing possibility of uncertainty. Probably, this is the reason customers look at the systems wherein they can repose their trust for information security as well as governance with local and remote data protection. Given these preferences, we, at Dell EMC, provide the best-in-class Modern Data Center platforms on the back of RSA and Dell EMC’s data protection portfolios.
  
  It helps our customers address any uncertainty they face with regard to data center modernization at the earliest. And these skills and services have ultimately set us apart from our competitors. 

Digital transformation is bringing transformative changes across industries. However,while several organizations are focusing more on how to make this transition happen, some are making fundamental changes needed to store as well as archive an increasing amount of data on which they are creating the new digital enterprise. After all, data center modernization and infrastructure agility initiatives lie at the heart of the digital transformation journey of every organization. The more innovative an organization will be at leveraging data, the more will be the possibility for it to pivot new products, services or initiatives rapidly.