Irrespective of any industry, every organization needs a data center. It is basically a physical place where all organizations store their information and application, which are very important to them. Furthermore, today, every business is very distributed and dynamic, which means these data centers need to be very agile and scalable. A data center comprises multiple technical types of equipment depending on what needs to be stored. It can have storage systems, routers, security devices, and application delivery controllers. Now there are different types of data centers available out there, and in this article, I will discuss about virtual data centers.
What is Virtual Data Center?
A Virtual Data Center or VDC consists of cloud infrastructure resources designed specifically for enterprise business needs. The cloud resources used in virtual data centers are storage for disk space, memory for the RAM, processor for CPU, and networking for bandwidth. You can consider a virtual data center as a virtual representation of physical data centers consisting of services, storage clusters, and many networking components. All these resources are present on one or more actual data centers virtually.
Virtual data centers are one of the most prominent products of cloud computing. It provides an opportunity for many small companies to set up their IT infrastructure using virtual data centers and not spend millions of dollars in setting up an actual physical data center with costly hardware. For using a virtual data center, these small organizations need to pay only for the resources they use, and this gives them great scalability and flexibility.
What is a VDC in the Context of Cloud Computing?
In the context of cloud computing, a virtual data center falls in the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) category. With a virtual data center, you have access to cloud infrastructure from any service provider immediately when you need it. It can provide storage, computing, networking components unnecessary applications on demand which can be integrated into the existing IT infrastructure of an organization. The idea of using a virtual data center solution gives the organization an option for adding capacity or installing new infrastructure without buying and storing costly hardware, which will take a lot of additional space and human resources.
How Does a Virtual Data Center Work?
To use a virtual data center, an organization leases the necessary cloud resources such as storage, compute, and networking connectivity from a cloud provider such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, etc. In this case, they need not maintain, and if we clear infrastructure on their own, it is done by the cloud provider. Thus, organizations only need to purchase the cloud resources they need. You can buy a virtual data center from cloud providers based on two different pricing models: on-demand and reserved. In the on-demand offering, the provider will give you necessary cloud resources when needed. In the reserved model, the provider will assign you the pre-allocated resources, and their availability is guaranteed.
Benefits of a Virtual Data Center
Cost Effective
A physical data center solution requires huge upfront financial investment to maintain the facility, purchase hardware, train employees, and many other overhead costs. You need not worry about these costs with virtual data centers as the cloud providers take care of them for you. This saves a lot of money for an organization helping them maximize their profits. And in the case of a virtual data center, you pay only for the resources you use.
Security
Virtual data centers can provide enterprise-grade security features that help keep your precious data safe and secure. This is because the virtual infrastructure is separated from the hardware infrastructure, so the virtual ecosystem remains encapsulated and protected. In addition, data centers also offer multiple data governance policies, which helps in maintaining a high level of compliance.
Faster Provisioning
Virtual data centers help in provisioning Virtual desktops and servers within minutes. Unlike in the past, the IT administrators today can assign a virtualized environment to the employees to work on in no time. And in case the organization needs increases, the additional resources can be added to the virtual data center quickly.
Increased Productivity
An organization’s profitability can be directly affected in the case of loss of productivity. Virtual data vendors help in increasing the productivity of IT administrators and other employees in the organization. This is because all the maintenance and management of the physical data center does not lie with the organization’s internal IT administrators or the employees. This helps them save a lot of time and focus on other essential tasks. The virtual data centers also offer services like load balancing, server failover, backup, and recovery functionalities, which helps in keeping your application up and running all the time.
Scalability
Virtual datacenters help you to scale the resources based on the demands of the business. Many organizations experience seasonality in their businesses, where the demands might go low. You can quickly scale down virtual data centers and remove unnecessary expenses. And during peak hours, scale up the virtual resources to meet the high demand.
Data Mobility
Employees of an organization might work remotely from different places, but they should be able to access important data and applications from anywhere. Virtual data centers allow you to access the data when you need it, wherever you need and ensure that the security and compliance policies are not compromised.
Response to Changing Business Needs
Virtual data centers are very dynamic and agile. They come with a lot of flexibility that allows an organization to upgrade or downgrade its virtual infrastructure according to market opportunities and demands. In cases where a product or an application has a massive spike in usage or traffic, with virtual data centers, the necessary compute, storage, and networking resources can be increased within no time. VDC allows you to pivot business operations and increase IT resources as per the changing business needs.
Final Thoughts
That was all about virtual data centers that you needed to know. They are one of the best infrastructure as a service solutions. Many organizations are using virtual data centers for their day-to-day operations. It helps the organization in saving a lot of costs, increasing productivity, scaling on-demand, enterprise-grade security, and much more. So go ahead and start using the power of virtual datacenters today.
