Traditional Data Center - is there a room for improvement?
The traditional data center, a telecommunication facility that houses bare-metal IT equipment used to deliver various services, has been rapidly changing for 15 years. The change started with the virtualization technologies, which made it possible for the IT services - HTTP(s), FTP, Email, AntiSpam, AntiVirus, Application Hosting, and many other services - to be delivered from virtualized computing instances, rather than from a bare-metal servers. The adoption of virtualization techniques helped administrators create hardware agnostic and more consistent technological frameworks that can be scaled on-demand without a dependence on vendor lock-in hardware.
Most producers of technology products making purpose-built hardware systems have released Software-as-a-service (SaaS) versions of their technology solutions. Today almost every networking software product or a service can be deployed, configured, and used as a software installation on top of a virtualized computing instance. This changed both the data centers and the office environments as companies no longer need to buy any specific hardware appliances.
The virtualization technologies have matured and have been gradually transformed into Cloud Computing (See Cloud Computing Questions and Answers). The Cloud Computing technologies that emerged within the last decade have started changing how we build applications, run them, manage them, and deliver IT services. Agility has become a key characteristic of any IT environment.
Today's Cloud Computing technologies are being used to serve resource-demanding applications. Businesses need consistent IT infrastructure which offers flexibility, scalability, secure data storage, and fast data processing, as machine learning is a fast-growing niche in the IT industry. The maintenance of the existing Applications, their migration into virtual environments, and the subsequent redesign to make them Cloud-native are just a few of the many operations performed in the modern data center. The Data Center itself has virtualized, starting with the introduction of the Virtual Environments and continued adoption of networking models of computing systems, software-defined storage (SDS), and software-defined networking (SDN).
Cloud Computing based Data Center
HCE has been using the VMware Cloud Computing platform to create purpose-built Clouds to allow our customers to host, maintain and develop applications based on market demands. Flexibility to deploy applications to any Cloud infrastructure - from the internal Private Servers to wide range of geographically dispersed Cloud Servers or bringing together the best of the Public and Private IT environments into a Hybrid Cloud is the most significant characteristic of the modern data center.
Agility is a factor of greater importance today as businesses need to accelerate time to market for new applications and services. What HCE does to facilitate companies in this process?
Building Consistent IT Infrastructure: HCE designs and customizes Virtual Data Centers where all three IT components - processing power, data storage, and networking - are deployed on top of a VMware powered enterprise Cloud infrastructure, compatible with all technologies that our clients have been using in their offices as well as in data centers.
Consistent IT Operations: HCE has an operational capabilities to install deliver and provision Dedicated Compute Clouds and Virtual Data Centers in each and every Equinix facility in Europe as well as in other 15 data centers across Europe, located in Amsterdam, Vienna, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Zaragoza, Prague, Bratislava, Luxembourg, Copenhagen, Oslo, Helsinki, Sofia, Athens and Tbilisi. In all those locations HCE provisions Cloud infrastructure automated to client's custom configurations.