Converged Infrastructure
As data centres continue to face the demand for more capacity and services at reduced cost, convergence provides some of the answers.
A converged infrastructure uses only those parts of compute and storage elements that are actually needed, meaning hardware is used more efficiently. Power and cooling costs are correspondingly lower, and centralisation reduces management cost. Convergence creates a data centre infrastructure that is minutely tailored to business requirements.
The flexibility that drives this level of personalisation is provided technically by virtualisation, automation and orchestration.
But the technical aspect is only part of the story: to plan, manage and implement the solution that exactly suits your requirements takes a vast amount of expertise and experience matching technical solutions to business requirements.
EGC consultants are some of the best-placed in the industry to give you that level of guidance. Because we are vendor-agnostic, we can make sure that our technical decisions are based on business outcomes for you.
Virtualisation
Virtualisation—or, in plain language, creating a simulated hardware or software platform from existing data centre components—allows you to consolidate your usage of servers, storage, networks, security, and management tools.
Whatever your platform or management software, we can help you save money, space, and time through discrete or strategic virtualisation, using the latest technologies from leading vendors.
Our architects and pre-sales consultants help from the beginning stages of a consolidation and virtualisation project right through to design and delivery. We provide guidance on:
Capacity planning and workload assessments
Cross-platform virtualisation solutions design
Implementation (Compute, Storage, Security, Network)
Management platform automation
Private cloud consulting, design and implementation.
Delivering IT as a service through cloud computing.
Focusing on the business not the technology, we can give you a detailed analysis of the financial implications of different virtualisation solutions, including financial modelling to establish the return on investment (ROI), total cost of ownership (TCO), net present value (NPV), and other calculations favoured by CFOs.
Automation
Automation simplifies your operations, helping you understand and control the status of your infrastructure (using a vendor-independent toolset). It can also lead to lower energy consumption and better green credentials of your operation.
We have integrated a range of tools to support streamlined operations and solve some key IT operational issues, including:
Multi vendor infrastructures
Migration between environments
Driving energy efficiency
Creating internal and hybrid cloud infrastructures
Driving infrastructure standardisation and subsequent efficiency
Key components of the Service Automation offering are:
Next Generation Infrastructure Management – with the ability to provide detailed insight into the status of the infrastructure and the data flows through it, including all network and server devices and key aspects of the data storage solution.
Agile Cloud Automation – the service infrastructure monitoring and control systems that enable a cloud computing solution to deliver services to end users across a range of platforms in support of all aspects of IT operations.
Energy Efficiency and Sustainability – monitors all energy use in an IT infrastructure and allows for this to be reported and optimised.
These components are based on mainstream products sourced from CA Technologies and other key vendors and are integrated onto your existing or future infrastructures by our skilled team backed by expert vendor support.
Orchestration
When data centre tasks are automated they become much more flexible. Orchestration allows you to combine, manage and scale automated computing activities according to your own requirements.
Orchestration frees you to think about what you want your data centre to do for you, rather than worrying about its limitations.
The end result of all this sounds simple—but it can only be achieved with the application of a great deal of experience and knowledge.
That is what EGC provides to help you optimise your own data centre infrastructure.
Private Cloud Solutions
As a leading system integrator, managed service provider, and managed hosting provider, we can build any size of bespoke private cloud solutions you might require, or we can deliver a readymade cloud solution to your site.
Our strategic data centre services can help you get the level of service you require from the cloud. Our experienced, certified consultants and engineers know how to help you realise the goals of lower costs—and higher revenue—by improving the levels of service throughout your IT environment.
We design, build, host and manage private cloud solutions
Logicalis offers a unique portfolio of private cloud solutions and services, and our experience gives us insight that we bring to bear in all new customer solution engagements.
Logicalis cloud solutions are:
Built with best practice expertise and years of experience in providing virtual Data Centre solutions.
Enterprise class and secure.
Governed by SLAs and service contracts.
Constructed to individual requirements.
Built with enterprise class technology infrastructure and software.
Our multi-vendor capabilities mean our consultants are unbiased and our advanced capabilities with private cloud computing let us work in the short, medium and long-term: it all adds up to a strategic virtualisation and cloud partnership between us and our customers.
Logicalis Optimal Services span the complete enterprise platform lifecycle, from traditional maintenance and monitoring services through to advanced private cloud platform management.
Data Centre Services
Data centres are secure buildings that house networked servers, storage and backup facilities.
A typical data centre design build service will provide space for hardware in a controlled environment, for instance using power and environmental cooling and air conditioning to enable the equipment to perform at its optimum level with maximum system availability.
Data centre services provide various levels of resilience in the form of backup power supplies and additional communications connections that may not be used until a problem occurs with the primary system - this is known as redundancy.
The main purpose of our data centre design build services are to run core business applications and store operational data as well as providing Disaster Recover (DR) facilities. Typical applications will be enterprise software systems such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) services.
Common components include firewalls, VPN gateways, routers and switches, database servers, file servers, application servers, web servers and middleware - all contained on physical hardware or on consolidated and virtualised platforms.
The Telecommunication Infrastructure Standard 942 provides guidance on standardisation of data centre design and classifies data centres into four tiers with level 4 being the most fault tolerant and guaranteeing 99.995% uptime, compared with Tier 1 which will guarantee 99.671% uptime. This standardisation is important for customers to understand and measure service providers against.
Why data centre services are business-critical
Most data centre deployments are carried out for the following reasons:
Availability: Maximising the availability of IT services to the organisation.
Business continuity: The redundancy, monitoring and infrastructure provided by most data centres means that the potential for business interruption is very low.
Lower total cost of ownership: Where an organisation has several ‘silos’ of data, it can combine resources and reduce the amount of separate data servers required. Staff overhead is reduced as administrative operations are simplified, whilst energy and floor space costs are reduced.
Agility: Centralising IT infrastructure within a data centre creates greater agility since new deployments do not have to be rolled out to multiple physical locations.
Data centre technology considerations
Power usage efficiency (PUE)
When designing new services or indeed a new data centre, it is important to consider this factor. An internationally recognised metric used to measure the efficiency of data centres in terms of energy, it measures the efficiency of power being provided to the whole facility, compared to power used by the ICT equipment, and provides a ratio of efficiency. For example a facility’s ICT equipment may draw 800Kw, and the cooling and environmental systems may draw a further 800Kw, this would be a PUE ratio of 2.0, where it is taking twice as much energy as is required by the ICT equipment to run the overall facility. PUE ratios of close to 1 are the most desirable, as they are the most energy efficient.
To consolidate, virtualise or not?
Consider whether all infrastructure is going to be hardware-based, or virtualised. An all hardware model will use more energy, while full or part consolidation and virtualisation will reduce energy consumption.
Monitoring
How is the data centre to be monitored and who will be doing this? What is the escalation process and where do lines of responsibility start and end? Is energy efficiency being monitored on an ongoing basis?
Service Level Agreement (SLA)
The increasing role of the CTO in negotiating contracts is crucial, in particular the SLAs that govern data centre and provider performance.
With a rapid change in the technological landscape, organizations today face intense competition on various factors such as time to market, scalability, security, reliability, application performance and cost pressure. The manageability challenges of networks have given rise to Software Defined Network and Network Function Virtualization to become practical in driving business outcomes.
SDN/NFV Services
The key business benefits with SDN/NFV deployments are derived from the efficiency obtained by the network and operations and include:
Service Automation - Automation of network services provide on demand and zero touch provisioning of network devices, which provides faster time to market
Business Intelligence - SDN understands the business application requirement and adapts the network layers accordingly, thereby providing requisite business outcome
Efficiency of Assets - IT managers will have an accurate depiction of network topology and usage, which will alleviate unnecessary upgrades of equipment, resulting in CapEx savings
Real-time Network Self- Optimization - improves operational excellence by 30%
Centralized Control - Single management console of all network resources reduces OpEx by 40%
EGC helps clients reshape their current network infrastructure to keep pace with digital trends by improving performance and optimized costs. Our engineering and development expertise helps customers transform their application to a virtualized environment. This includes network assessment, consultancy and roadmap planning, design and implementation, validation and verification, business process transformation and skill building.
EGC’s Advance Networking Service engineers provide:
Next-generation application infrastructure SDN/NFV
Network design and optimization
Networking Protocol (L1-L7) Provisioning
Routing-Switching Virtualization
Bandwidth on Demand with Calendaring
Intelligent traffic steering and on demand workload placement among DCs
Unified Communication and Collaboration Service
Managed Network Services
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