The Align Podcast: Episode 06

The Align Podcast

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.