The traditional data center model is like the old cable TV and music models, which forced you to buy and pay for all 189 channels and all ten songs, even if you only wanted a few. The evolved data center model, in contrast, is like the new TV and music models – you only buy the show or the song you want. Where the traditional colocation model locks you into long-term contracts for power you may not use, the evolved payfor-use model eliminates the need to forecast IT demand and provides control over capacity. As a result, you reduce waste and align your data center to the needs of your business. Aligned Data Centers is the first to bring this evolved data center model to the marketplace. The pages that follow explain how.

These are all marketing terms being used to describe data center colocation offerings. (IO is no exception.) But what do these terms really mean to an organization? What does “next-generation” or “2.0” or “future proof” or “hybrid” do for those people who are responsible for data center operations? Why should a CIO or data center manager care if his data center is “next-generation”? Why look for a provider with an “enterprise hybrid solution”? In this Solution Guide, we cut through the marketing hype and answer those questions.

The data center has assumed a new, more prominent role as a strategic asset within the organization. Increasing capacity demands and the pressure to support the “always-on” digital business are forcing data centers to adapt, evolve, and respond at an increasingly accelerated rate. Cloud, mobility, IoT, big data – these and other interrelated trends are putting enormous pressure on the modern data center. To keep pace, today’s physical infrastructure has become vastly more complex, interconnected, and performance-driven than a decade ago.-

Multimode fiber (MMF) cabling is the workhorse media of local area network (LAN) backbones and data centers because it offers the lowest cost means of transporting high data rates for distances aligned with the needs of these environments. MMF has evolved from being optimized for multi-megabit per second transmission using light emitting diode (LED) light sources to being specialized to support multi-gigabit transmission using 850 nm vertical cavity surface emitting laser (VCSEL) sources. Channel capacity has been multiplied through the use of parallel transmission over multiple strands of fiber. These advances have increased multimode supported data rates by an astounding factor of 40,000 — from 10 Mb/s in the late 1980s to 100 Gb/s in 2010, with 400 Gb/s in development in 2015. Today, these extraordinary rates are created from collections of 25 Gb/s lanes carried on either four or sixteen strands of fiber in each direction

Even through challenging economic times, the need for physical data center capacity continues to grow. For some businesses, the driver is expansion into new markets or geographies. For others, it's the need to deal with growing amounts of data generated by applications with high-capacity demands, evolving end-user abilities, or regulatory bodies that demand ever-increasing quantities of meticulous documentation. The "build-or-buy" decision between construction and colocation should be weighed carefully, as the choice will affect your company and your bottom line quite literally for decades. This executive report will review six key factors that affect that choice, some of which extend beyond a basic TCO analysis.

CyrusOne’s quick-delivery data center product provides a solution for cloud technology, social media and enterprise companies that have trouble building or obtaining data center capacity fast enough to support their information technology (IT) infrastructure. In trying to keep pace with overwhelming business growth, these companies often find it hard to predict their future capacity needs. A delay in obtaining data center space can also delay or stop a company’s revenue-generating initiatives, and have significant negative impact on the bottom line.

If your business is like most, you are grappling with data storage. In an annual Frost & Sullivan survey of IT decision-makers, storage growth has been listed among top data center challenges for the past five years.2 With businesses collecting, replicating, and storing exponentially more data than ever before, simply acquiring sufficient storage capacity is a problem. Even more challenging is that businesses expect more from their stored data. Data is now recognized as a precious corporate asset and competitive differentiator: spawning new business models, new revenue streams, greater intelligence, streamlined operations, and lower costs. Booming market trends such as Internet of Things and Big Data analytics are generating new opportunities faster than IT organizations can prepare for them.

When measuring competitive differentiation in milliseconds, connectivity is a key component for any financial services company’s data center strategy. In planning the move of its primary data center, a large international futures and commodities trading company needed to find a provider that could deliver the high capacity connectivity it required.

Businesses face greater uncertainty than ever. Market conditions, customer desires, competitive landscapes, and regulatory constraints change by the minute. So business success is increasingly contingent on predictive intelligence and hyperagile responsiveness to relentlessly evolving demands. This uncertainty has significant implications for the data center — especially as business becomes pervasively digital. IT has to support business agility by being more agile itself. It has to be able to add services, scale capacity up and down as needed, and nimbly remap itself to changes in organizational structure.

The average data center refreshes their storage system every three to five years. But organizations don’t start this process because the calendar tells them to. Something happens in the environment that forces that upgrade, typically the storage system failing to meet the performance and/or capacity demands of the organization. Occasionally, there is a specific software feature or hardware advancement that requires a new storage system. The worst reason is when a vendor implements “technology obsolesce”, an approach that makes the out-­-year maintenance of the existing system so expensive the customer is forced into buying a new system. Download this white paper to learn why vendors need to move to a model that unbundles the factors driving storage upgrades.

No matter how advanced data centers may become, they remain in a perpetual state of change in order to meet the demands of virtualized environments. But with the advent of software-­defined storage (SDS) architecture, capabilities associated with hyperconverged technologies (including compute, storage, and networking), help data centers meet virtualization requirements with less administrator intervention at webscale. This flexible, scale­-out, and highly automated architecture provides enterprise­-class data services for each workload, supplying the appropriate levels of capacity, performance, and protection while containing costs and bringing agility and efficiency to the data center by simplifying management, reducing reconfigurations, and improving TCO.

For many companies the appeal of the public cloud is very real. For tech startups, the cloud may be their only option, since many don’t have the capital or expertise to build and operate the IT systems their businesses need. Existing companies with established data centers are also looking at public clouds, to increase IT agility while limiting risk. The idea of building-out their production capacity while possibly reducing the costs attached to that infrastructure can be attractive. For most companies the cloud isn’t an “either-or” decision, but an operating model to be evaluated along with on-site infrastructure. And like most infrastructure decisions the question of cost is certainly a consideration. In this report we’ll explore that question, comparing the cost of an on-site hyperconverged solution with a comparable set up in the cloud. The on-site infrastructure is a Dell EMC VxRailTM hyperconverged appliance cluster and the cloud solution is Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Today enterprises are more dependent on robust, agile IT solutions than ever before. It’s not just about technology—people and processes need to make the cloud journey too, and to realize the benefit of new technology, new support is needed.

Storage arrays are struggling to keep up with virtualized data centers. The traditional solution of buying more capacity to get more performance is an expensive answer – with inconsistent results. A new approach is required to more cost effectively provide the storage performance you need, when and where you need it most.

The explosion in IT demand has intensified pressure on data center resources, making it difficult to respond to business needs, especially while budgets remain flat. As capacity demands become increasingly unpredictable, calculating the future needs of the data center becomes ever more difficult. The challenge is to build a data center that will be functional, highly efficient and cost-effective to operate over its 10-to-20-year lifespan. Facilities that succeed are focusing on optimization, flexibility and planning—infusing agility through a modular data center design.

"Today’s data centers are being asked to do more at less expense and with little or no disruption to company operations. They’re also expected to run 24x7, handle numerous new application deployments and manage explosive data growth. Data storage limitations can make it difficult to meet these stringent demands. Faced with these challenges, CIOs are discovering that the “rip and replace” disruptive migration method of improving storage capacity and IO performance no longer works. Access this white paper to discover a new version of NetApps storage operating environment. Find out how this software update eliminates many of the problems associated with typical monolithic or legacy storage systems."

In the current landscape of modern data centers, IT professionals are stretched too thin. Triage situations are the norm and tend to reduce the time spent on strategic business objectives. This paper offers a solution to this IT dilemma, outlining the ways to achieve a storage infrastructure that enables greater performance and capacity.

Data Center Automation enables you to manage change processes, ensure configuration compliance and dynamically provision servers and applications based on business need. By controlling complexity and automating processes in the data center, your data center becomes more adaptive and agile. Effective Data Center Automation lets you leverage virtualization, manage capacity, and reduce costs and also helps reduce energy usage and waste.

It used to be that you would build out your datacenter with all the right considerations in place, purchasing equipment that was sized to meet the needs of your organization for today and the near term future. Change used to be merely planning for capacity upgrades or network expansion, or migrating to the latest application version—or more simply put: things we could measure, control and manage. With the advent of the cloud, the rise in cyber-based threats, and the need to do more, faster, we’re witnessing a perfect storm that is making it more and more difficult for the enterprise to plan for change, and to maximize the investments that they make in their IT infrastructure today. This eBook will focus on considerations that you should make when deciding on an ADC solution that can not only survive these changes, but help create opportunities for innovation as the enterprise strives towards digital transformation. This guide will help you understand the changes that are currently unde

The world of IT is undergoing a digital transformation. Applications are growing fast, and so are the users consuming them. These applications are everywhere—in the datacenter, on virtual and/or microservices platforms, in the cloud, and as SaaS. More and more apps are now being moved out of datacenters to a cloud-based infrastructure. In order for an optimized and secure delivery of these applications, IT needs specific network appliances called Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs). These ADCs come in hardware, virtual, and containerized form factors, and are sized by Network Administrators based on the current and future usage of applications. The challenge with this is that it’s hard to foresee sizing or scalability requirements for these ADCs since users are constantly increasing, and applications are consistently evolving, as well as moving out of datacenters. Complicating matters, most ADCs are fixed-capacity network appliances that provide zero or minimum expansion capability

Using the five step process outlined in this white paper, we were able to eliminate more than 2,000 servers from our own IT infrastructure, saving an estimated $10 million dollars in data center costs.

Consuma TI variables. HPE Datacenter Care Flexible Capacity.

The value of conventional on-premises servers is eroding. As with all decay, it starts slowly and declines steadily. Bits and pieces of the physical server market are peeling off as businesses turn away from conventional data center and IT closet deployments in favor of cloud-based infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). And there’s no shortage of IaaS; hosting and service-provider companies are flooding the market with low-cost access to hosted servers. The challenge for adopting businesses is leveraging hosted assets that guarantee data security and integrity with fine-grained levels of adjustable capacity, high performance and price predictability.

As wattages increase in high-density server racks, providing redundant power becomes more challenging and costly. Traditionally, the most practical solution for distributing redundant power in 208V server racks above 5 kW has been to connect dual 3-phase rack PDUs to dual power supplies in each server. Although this approach is reliable, it negates a rewarding system design opportunity for clustered server applications. With their inherent resilience and automated failover, high-availability server clusters will still operate reliably with a single power supply in each server instead of dual power supplies. This streamlined system design promises to reduce both capital expenditures and operating costs, potentially saving thousands of dollars per rack. The problem is that dual rack PDUs can’t distribute redundant power to a single power supply. An alternative approach is to replace the dual PDUs with an automatic transfer switch (ATS) connected to a single PDU, but perfecting an ATS tha

As high-density IT equipment becomes the new normal, the amount of heat generated continues to grow substantially – as does the challenge of efficiently cooling data centers. Traditional perimeter and/or raised floor computer room air conditioning systems increasingly struggle to remove concentrated heat loads. In many small to mid-size data centers, implementing close-coupled cooling solutions can be a highly effective and efficient strategy for supplementing cooling capacity. Located in or near server racks, close-coupled air conditioning units focus cooling where it is needed most without lowering the temperature of the entire data center. In addition, these modular solutions make it easy to reconfigure cooling to handle new equipment or eliminate hot spots. As a result, using close-coupled portable, rack-mounted or row-based air conditioning units tailored to your specific data center needs can boost cooling efficiency and add valuable flexibility.