Why Hardware (Still) Matters in the Data Centre

Many discussions about data centre modernization involve massiveenterprises that focus on efforts such as incorporating automation throughouttheir data centres, containerizing applications for cross-environmentportability and moving to a more agile app development process.

All of these use cases are enormously valuable for the rightorganizations. But for many customers, data centre modernization meanssomething different. These organizations are focused on getting the bestpossible performance, improving the efficiency of infrastructure management andshrinking their data centres' footprints and utility bills all withoutbusting their IT budgets.

Many of these businesses have largely predictable workloads, and theywouldn't see any cost benefit from moving to the public cloud. They simply wantto shrink from three racks down to one, boost the performance of theirapplications and manage everything on their own, without having to bring inexternal consultants once a week.

For these organizations, data centre hardware is still king.

Adding ValueThrough Server and Storage Upgrades

The end-of-supportdeadlines for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 andWindows Server 2008 are motivating many organizations to finally refresh theiraging data centre infrastructure. As they do so, it's important that theydeploy new equipment that will be cost-effective and provide a high level ofperformance for years to come.

For organizations that are making new investments in hardware, here aretwo pieces of advice: Opt for servers that support Optane memory and chooseall-flash storage over spinning disks.

Optane memory is a system acceleration solution from Intel thatimproves server performance. While it's relatively new, emerging applicationsare going to be written to leverage Optane memory, and organizations may find themselves needing to refresh theirequipment sooner rather than later if they don't plan ahead.

Flash storage provides a significant performance boost over spinningdisks. That's no secret, but many organizations are still purchasing slowerhard disk drives (HDDs) instead of flash. The reason: HDDs are less expensive.What these organizations likely don't realize is that modern data deduplicationand compression techniques allow them to deploy flash storage for around the samecost as spinning disks. Given the dramatic performance boost, the decisionbetween flash and HDDs should be something of a no-brainer.

AchievingYour Own Version of Digital Transformation

With terms such as digital transformation dominating discussions aboutIT, it can sometimes seem like a company doesn't matter unless it's aiming tobe the next Uber or Netflix. It's true that top-shelf servers or flash storagearen't going to upend entire industries all on their own. But infrastructureupgrades can deliver transformative benefits to individual organizations.

For example, one post-secondary institution was using HDDs in its data centre,creating such a severe storage bottleneck that students had to register forclasses in assigned slots to prevent the registration system from crashing. Theregistration process ate up an entire week each semester, and classes wereoften filled by the time many students' slots came up.

CDW replaced the university's spinning disks with an all-flash array.Within a single semester, all students were able to register simultaneously.This meant that students were able to adjust their plans on the fly whenpopular classes began to fill, rather than having to go back and forth withtheir advisers to work on a class schedule.

That might not meet the standard definition of digital transformation, and some people might not even consider it an example of data centremodernization. But for a student who's saving thousands of dollars in tuitionand starting a career six months earlier than might otherwise be possible, theterminology isn't as important as the results.

Want to learnmore about how CDW can help you prepare your data centre for the future? Visit CDW.ca/DataCentre