New Data Center?

Ensure success with proactive network and application performance management from Day One.

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It is undeniable that cloud adoption has been on the rise during and post-COVID-19. Applications have been moved to the cloud, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) and unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) use has skyrocketed. But what has that meant for the traditional private data center? 

One of the authorities in this space, AFCOM, recently offered some interesting survey results. According to its “2021 State of the Data Center Report,” 58 percent of respondents are noticing organizations moving to colocation (co-lo) or private data centers and away from public cloud. Additionally, 58 percent also indicated that they were seeing the repatriation of application workloads from the cloud back to on-premises data centers or co-los.  

One of the more critical points revealed in the survey results was in response to the question on the number of new data centers that were to be built in the next three years. In this case, 48 percent said they would be building data centers within the next 12 to 36 months, with the following breakdown:

  • 19% stated one new data center
  • 19% stated at least two new data centers
  • 5% indicated between five and seven new data centers

The study also indicated that from a technology deployment perspective, more than a quarter of the respondents were sourcing white-box or commodity systems in their data center, and another 31 percent would be deploying them in the next 12 to 36 months.

Implementing a new data center is not for the faint of heart. It is expensive; has high visibility with CXO-level executives; is multivendor and complex; runs business-critical services; and most likely has application services that need to interoperate with other co-los, cloud, and edge locations over internet and WAN connectivity. There may be an infinite number of issues that can occur to impact service performance for an organization’s end users.  

One organization going through this deployment planning and build-out process decided the best way to ensure success was to include high-quality network and application performance management from the very start of the project to ensure that at each step—preproduction, rollout, and postproduction—it had the visibility necessary to ensure quality delivery of services via its new data center. See how it accomplished this with NETSCOUT.