Issue 2 | July 2010

Going IT central

The growing trend towards centralisation of servers, and virtualisation of services at remote locations, can lead to fast payback, as Phil Turner explains.

For users, what happens in the data centre – including  the gradual centralisation of servers – takes place in the background, unseen and unheard, and rightly so. Most users’ interest in IT is at the level of printing documents or saving and accessing files, and they want these actions to be easy and instantaneous.

WAN optimisation provides better access to remote files but does not really deal with services at a local level. As a result, servers still remain in remote offices or at branch level to service local user demands, creating a maintenance burden.

Centralisation is a major drive for many businesses, but customers may not believe that they can realise it without some form of compromise for their users locally.

‘Centralisation supports data centre initiatives such as virtualisation, and represents a significant cost saving, the removal of an IT management headache and savings in licence fees,' says Phil, Pre-sales Consultant at a&o systems. ‘The hard fact is that customers' IT departments are experiencing a huge dilemma: they want to please the user community, while also supporting the strategic goals of the organisation.'

To achieve this, there is WAN optimisation technology, which improves access to centralised business-critical services. The next step is to use the optimisation appliance in the branch as a virtual server and services engine, allowing some critical components such as print, DNS, firewall and VPN to be virtualised on the device. This removes the need for further servers and other third party appliances at local level, further supporting the drive for centralisation. By retaining these services on a single appliance, managed remotely, businesses can remove potential points of failure and create greater value without adversely affecting users in the branches.

'The main impact we see with customers rolling out this technology is the reduction in CIFS traffic, the most common form of file traffic,’ says Phil. 'And for customers that replicate large amounts of data, using solutions such as EMC between sites, this is the ideal solution, cutting transfer times and backup and replication windows dramatically. Many customers just don’t realise the increase in application performance and overall employee productivity gains that are achievable.'

It is normal for customers to have concerns over investment and how future-proofed new solutions might be, says Phil. ‘Badly advised companies throw money at solutions that often fail to yield results. We know that you can’t just ignore issues of latency and fix problems by buying more bandwidth – our solutions are way smarter than that.'

More informed business decisions are enabled by a&o's engagement model, which allows customers to try before they buy, adds Phil. ‘They can measure a trial against success criteria and agreed KPIs to prove the business case and ROI. It all combines to make a&o a compelling proposition.'