Building Data Centers for the Future

Art Dooling, Assessments, Moves, Migrations
Tom Weber, RCDD, Data Center Design/Build and Efficiency

Tom Weber: Over the past, let's say five to 10 years, there's been a big shift in where data centers are being built. Traditionally, a lot of our customers bought an office space, a floor, several floors, whatever it may be, and carved out an area where they built a data center internal to the premise.

Art Dooling: People had data centers in the same office buildings that they resided in because it was a “touch and feel,” people to support it, do those types of things. After 9/11, it seemed that people were moving data centers more out of security reasons and safe zones and to get them into locations that were more favorable and less risky. Now people are moving data centers to locations that are cheaper because the latency's not as big an impact anymore. Technology and the speed of the technology is getting faster so that people don't have to be in their backyards to be able to access the information.

Tom Weber: In addition to the fact that in order to properly operate a data center, you need a lot of expertise — how to test generators, how to make sure your UPS is functioning properly so your uptime is increased. We come in with the knowledge of how to do the physical infrastructure and how to set a company up for the next 10 to 20 years to support their growing IT demands.

Art Dooling: The biggest responsibility we feel as a service provider to our clients is, when we do these transitions, is to have them understand that the steps that they take today will help them in the future. So that if they can't go "all virtual" right away and they can't send things to the cloud, we're developing a road map for them that they will be set up to be able to do that transition in the future and have it be cost-effective when it happens five years down the road, seven years down the road, whenever it might be.

Tom Weber: We really were born and raised in the physical layer. A lot of our competition is driven from a much more, say, hands-off approach, where they come from a managing role as opposed to understanding how things should be implemented.

Art Dooling: We understand really what the technology is in the data center. Then from our discovery tools, we're able to then see what is running on those devices to be able to understand applications. Because we really focus on the application layer and how those applications are residing in their environment.

Tom Weber: We extract that information from their current environment, combine it with best practices and current technologies that they might not have implemented yet and put together a design that will keep them in business in that data center for the next 10 or 20 years.

Art Dooling: And then it's managed services and supporting it after. And I think it's unique that Align provides all those solutions. Certainly each of them stand on their own, but if a client wants to come to one company and get the full service of getting their data center solutions provided to them, Align's the answer.



The Align Podcast: Episode 06

Mark Rode on the Align/EMC Partnership

Mark Rode
VP, Sales

There are very, very few partners of EMC today that are both a Premier Reseller, a Preferred Service Provider and a P3 Services Partner. We have a 27-year very, very rich history of 100 percent project success. And if you take a look at one of the things that really makes Align different from many of the other resellers and other partners out in the market, it's where our roots are; it's where we came from.

We help customers secure data centers, build data centers. We design data centers around the world. We help customers move from one data center to another, both equipment and people, and then we support them with a vast array of managed services and cloud services. 

So I think one of the things that Align really brings to the EMC relationship is the ability to help the EMC team get out front early in the sales campaign, around the selection, design and build of data center.

You know, in today's IT environment, the whole thing is around making IT a profit center versus a cost center. Helping them not just spend money keeping the lights on, but spend money driving productive initiatives to drive profitability into the company. So roles are changing, people are changing, technology is changing very quick, and we have to make sure that we have a sales and technical organization that can help people get ready for this wave of IT transformation that we're experiencing right now.


The Align Podcast: Episode 04

Brandon Travon on the Align/EMC Partnership

Brandon Travan

Managed Services, Cloud Solutions

There are many cloud solution models out there — some open source models, some mammoth providers that have built their own custom platforms. But by using EMC and VMware, and by extension Cisco technology, and then building our environment using EMC's VSPEX Reference Architectures in our design, we're able to use our cloud to offer clients enterprise-grade tools that they're already plugged into, that their legacy applications already work with on par with what they would have built themselves in-house, without having to retrofit or rebuild any application, but consume it as an OPEX, consume it in the cloud model, have dynamic scale and have the guarantee that it's being run by experts on a day-to-day basis.

It's not easy to become the level of partner that we've achieved with EMC. We've put an enormous amount of time and money and care into acquiring the skill set, into building the right team, into training that team over the years, making sure they've got the gray hair that they need to be the utmost expert in these technologies.



The Align Podcast: Episode 05

Align Webinar (Video): Can you manage your service desk from chaos to compliance?

Join Marc D. Gelineau and Brandon Travan of Align Managed Services to learn how you can leverage Align Managed Services and the ServiceNow platform to benefit from flawless service delivery, ITIL governance and best practices.

The Align Podcast: Episode 03

Align Managed Services: Marc D. Gelineau discusses Align Managed Services.

Align Managed Services: Meet Marc D. Gelineau and learn how Align Managed Services provides value to organizations of all sizes in every industry.

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The Align Podcast is an audio and video series focused on internal and external programs at Align.

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