As part of a project kickoff meeting yesterday, I walked through a massive data center in Northern VA. It’s the same one that houses huge portions of the Amazon Web Services’ us-east region, amongst nearly every other major ‘who’s who’ of the Internet age.
Of the various people that accompanied me on this tour, there were several that marveled at both the expansive magnitude, as well as the seemingly strict order of cages, racks, and hallways alike. Seeing this all through the eyes of folks that had not been in a data center before got me thinking about a simple question: “Has your vendor spent time in a data center?”
I pose this question both literally and figuratively. For enterprises, the data center is more than just a location. The data center encompasses not just a location, but business logic, processes, software, licenses, infrastructure, personnel, technology, and data. Saying something is “in the data center” imparts a certain gravity, meaning that a person has implied capability, responsibility, and knowledge. For a technology, being in the data center means that it’s likely a critical component of the business. By being “in the data center”, a technology has most likely met numerous standards for not just functionality to the business, but also reliability and security.
When it comes to IT environments, then, there are really two categories when it comes to the data center. Those technologies, people, and businesses that have experience working in one, and everyone and everything else. In no place is this notion more important, and true, than in Enterprise IT.
Innovation happens in the data center because of the unique problems encountered with IT at scale. If a vendor is not familiar with the types of issues organizations face at the data center scale, they’ll likely discover numerous limitations in capability and process alike. Furthermore; and a bit more insidious, is that the vendor doesn’t understand how IT organizations interact with and otherwise manage the data center environment in the first place.
Actual results may vary, but I’d venture that many solutions born in places other than the data center tend to cost more to implement, and have more thorny integration issues than promised—as a likely result of forcing the hand of IT organizations and business to effectively and wholly change their approach rather than just presenting a technology that fuses well with existing process, then presenting those same organizations with the choice of when and how to evolve.
IT organizations need solutions born in and for the data center. Looking to a team that has significant experience building, managing, selling to, and supporting the data center environment can be a significant benefit to IT organizations. Thankfully, CloudBolt is just one such company with substantial data center experience. This results in C2 being designed and built with the data center in mind. This has several effects:
- For one, we’ll understand your actual problem, not the problem we, as a vendor, want you to have.
- Two, we’ll be dis-inclined to wedge our product in places where it doesn’t fit well merely because we know what it takes to support a product in the enterprise, and we definitely don’t want to support an ill-fitting product in a data center.
- Lastly, we’ll allow you to both implement the new tool, and continue to keep up business-as-usual. No sweeping, massive change required up front.
Collectively, our team has spent over 40 person-years in the data center. It shows in how we interact with customers, and it definitely shows in our product.
Why not give our whitepaper a once-over, and then take C2 for a test drive?