Dimension Data has today launched a maturity tool to help organisations assess their capabilities and prioritise initiatives for building next-generation data centres.
A demand from consumers for solutions that would enable them to make their data centres more responsive and agile, led to the creation of the Data Centre Development Model.
According to Steve Joubert, Group Executive for Data Centres at Dimension Data, global competitive pressures brought on by social, mobile, analytics and cloud have had a tremendous impact on data centres to transform to remain relevant.
"Every client we speak to, is looking for ways to transform their data centres to become more responsive to business needs. This is not an easy undertaking," he said.
Dimensional Data understood that as companies eye cloud storage services, the impact of not looking at all areas, including networking and security, could be financially disastrous.
Most IT departments still have siloed functions and do not understand the impact of their projects on other parts of the infrastructure, including the data centre itself. Furthermore, deciding where to start for the maximum benefit has revealed itself to be an issue.
As an example, the ultimate cost of the project three-fold could be increased if virtualisation and converged infrastructure projects don’t include a review and strategy for the underlying network.
Mr Joubert added: "It’s with this in mind that we developed the Data Centre Development Model. It’s all about helping our clients make the shift to new operating models across the entire next-generation data centre, while focusing on business outcomes with technology being the enabler and differentiator, instead of a hindrance."
Dimension Data’s Data Centre Development Model will scrutinise the 11 critical domains in the data centre ("as-is" state) and what their future needs will be ("to-be" state).
The output of the workshop-style engagement is a roadmap which provides practical implementation recommendations for the most valuable initiatives around their data centre.
The solution will identify infrastructure gaps in an organisation and understand the best ways to exploit public cloud, hosting, and co-location where it creates value for the business.
It will also ensure the network is geared to support the journey of transformation and embed security throughout the process.
Mr Joubert said: "We helped one organisation build a virtual data centre, which delivered a 30% reduction in real estate through consolidation and data centre design. Another client saw new resources deliver services 75% faster to its end-users leveraging network extensions to cloud resources."
