Data centre networking

Your data centre is crucial in your move to virtualisation, shared utility services and cloud computing. You aim to reduce the total cost of ownership by consolidating your data centre infrastructure, and increasing utilisation to reduce costs. You also want to increase your organisation's agility, ensure higher levels of resilience and availability, and improve access to your applications and information.

With this as a backdrop, the network in the data centre has a crucial role to play in forming the foundation of the modern data centre and enabling its success.

Today's data centre networks are complex with many complementary and codependant technologies needed for them to run smoothly, including Ethernet switching, storage networking, application delivery, core IP services (DNS, DHCP, IP address management).

Innovation in these areas allows your data centre network to:

be more intelligent and application aware
provide improved support for virtualisation
reduce costs by consolidating networking and cabling infrastructures
provide a stable and robust platform for an always-on business environment

We recommend an approach to data centre networking that starts with understanding the business objectives and the operational context in the four towers of the data centre – server-side networking, storage-side networking, network services and application services.

Our process comprises the following steps:

identify – review the impact of technology on your operations
discover – conduct a discovery and/or a technology assessment
assess – analyse outputs of the assessment and create a roadmap of prioritised initiatives
recommend – review and agree on recommendations and the suggested roadmap
execute – deliver on the recommendations
improve – repeat these steps regularly due to the cyclical nature of ageing technology and operational changes

You can realise these benefits from a structured approach to architecting your data centre network:

improved network performance
reduced capital and operational costs
a network that supports virtualisation
reduced infrastructure complexity
improved network management
a more flexible switching architecture

a network that adapts to the demands of modern business
higher levels of application availability and security
better end-user experience when connecting to applications
improved sustainability

Our Data Centre Networking Assessment will help you create an actionable strategic roadmap using best practice, market experience and the latest innovative thinking. This will ensure that your network architecture meets your current and future business objectives.

We can also assist with these related solutions:

Data centres: ensure your data centre delivers business services faster, more efficiently and more securely while accommodating storage, virtualisation and sustainability requirements.
Cloud computing: use developer- and enterprise IT-friendly cloud services that are secure, easy to use, fast, and designed to run complex, high-performance applications.
Networking: create a corporate network that's flexible, tailored to your communication needs, compliant with regulation and corporate governance, and aligned with industry standards.
Virtualisation: prepare your data centre network for a fully virtualised computing environment, including desktop and server virtualisation.
Sustainability: reduce your organisation's energy consumption and carbon footprint and by optimising your data centre infrastructure.