Business Agility and the Adaptive Data Center

As businesses strive for competitive advantage against the increasing pace of change in the global economy, information technology is seen as a key strategic differentiator by the most successful executive teams.

CIOs are under enormous pressure to deliver business services rapidly while accommodating the unforeseen changes that may result from mergers and acquisitions or other unpredictable circumstances. The data center infrastructure they rely on must be flexible and adaptive to rapidly changing conditions.

The Adaptive Data Center

An adaptive data center is an intelligent infrastructure that enables business agility, reduces operational costs, and lays the foundation to reach beyond conventional data center architectures to private and public cloud computing environments. These capabilities are delivered by three primary characteristics—

• Consolidated, virtualized infrastructure that behaves like a shared pool of resources that can be reconfigured dynamically to allocate different types and amounts of resources to application services as demands fluctuate over time
• Service-oriented architecture, where the applications and workflows that support varying business functions are designed as abstract services independent of any specific data center resources
• Unified intelligent automation, where a data center-level operating system takes a holistic view over the entire infrastructure, dynamically creates fully functional computing environments, and optimizes the allocation of application services according to organizational policies and required service levels