Consolidating Remote Servers And Storage: The IT Dream

Many organisations have invested in server consolidation, particularly consolidating IT infrastructure from remote sites back into their datacentres. In remote offices, though, servers and storage often still remain as isolated islands of IT infrastructure that require management through separate operational processes and procedures. This approach could place key company data at risk, as there remote sites are often much less secure than the data centre. A new kind of storage architecture allows IT to consolidate remote servers and data into the data centre by decoupling storage from its server over any distance—even thousands of miles—and still deliver the same performance as if the storage remained in the branch. Organisations can now consolidate remote infrastructure to increase security and efficiency, without adversely impacting end-user performance in branch offices.

The Impact Of Virtualisation On The Datacentre

Server virtualisation penetration is estimated to be about 50 percent, according to several market research firms. Large companies in particular have been expanding branch offices during the past few years, yet server virtualisation at the network edge significantly trails that in the data centre, according to IDC. Branch and remote locations are ripe for adoption of virtualisation to take advantage of the operational and cost savings it provides. The challenge remains that for many organisations, data stored in remote locations is at risk from a variety of perils ranging from environmental disasters to political disruption to locally lax standards regarding cyber security.

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Even if a remote operation is based in a relatively stable and safe locale, it may be difficult and expensive to find IT support or skills that match up with those present in the central datacentres. It can also be costly to maintain and operate dedicated server resources in branch offices. Storing large amounts of data in the branch office might be putting IT reliability data security in jeopardy.

Projecting Virtual Servers To Branch Locations

IT consolidation projects allow organisations to cut costs, improve security, concentrate investments, and ultimately evolve computing infrastructure to a private cloud model. Consolidating branch IT resources to datacentres has been a goal of IT for many years now, but these projects have often run into performance hurdles.

Branch servers and applications can be migrated to datacentres, but because end users stay put, the distance between them and their applications increases, which can drastically reduce application performance. WAN Acceleration technology, for example from Riverbed, has made consolidation possible for most business applications without impacting performance.

However, write-intensive business applications, or those with a low tolerance for limited bandwidth, high latency, and connectivity problems have until now left organisations with no choice other than to provision local server and storage resources. In other cases, certain services (such as DHCP, DNS, Printing etc) should be run locally in the branch office to service the needs of the users there. A radical innovation in technology has been required to allow this type of remote server and storage system to also be consolidated back to the data centre.

Consolidating Remote Servers And Storage For Security, Efficiency

Consolidating infrastructure within the branch and to the data centre can lighten the IT footprint at remote locations and improve cost efficiency. The final step in this journey is to remove the physical servers, storage and backup infrastructure from the branch office, and this is now possible thanks to Riverbed.

Data and servers that used to be distributed can now reside centrally and be effectively projected to the edge locations where they perform as if they were local. Datacentres can be integrated with storage and sharing the resource with branch offices. Whether it’s the forces of globalisation or the need to get closer to customers in new markets, enterprises are increasingly being driven to open branch offices, even in areas that are extremely remote and relatively hostile to data security best practices.

With this new “Storage Delivery” technology, IT teams can now manage and monitor corporate standards for security and compliance from central locations where dedicated personnel and tools are present, and ensure security of the organisation’s information assets, while reducing costs.

The author is Marketing Evangelist, APAC and Japan, Riverbed Technology.