Today’s data center infrastructure has to be more agile than ever before. It needs to increase efficiency while increasing agility, and providing more and more services.

Having an agile infrastructure lets you change how IT operates. It lets you adapt to growth – even unexpected growth. It allows you to meet business challenges head-on, and make the fast adjustments that are often necessary in business.

This agility spreads from one end of the data center to the other, and includes things like data storage, networking, virtualization, and more.

If you’re looking to implement a new agile infrastructure, you need to cover certain essential areas. Here are some characteristics you need to make sure you’re getting from your infrastructure:

• Efficient storage. You need to have a number of technologies in place that make your storage environment more efficient. That should include elements such as replication, deduplication, compression, optimization of media, optimization of performance, and even point-in-time snapshots.

• Storage tiering. Accordingly, you need to be able to have an environment where data can be prioritized and stored on the right media accordingly. Data should be prioritized based on workload and affinity, and then distributed out to the storage technology with the appropriate service level.

• Data protection. Today, it’s more important than ever that your data is protected from disaster. That means you need enterprise-wide disaster recovery technologies, appropriate backups, and archiving for those applications that support it.

• Continuous operations. Uptime is a major concern of your infrastructure, especially as companies come to rely to a greater degree on the data center. Your data availability needs to be non-stop. You need to use workload migration, load balancing, and more. You need to be able to repair, replace, or upgrade an infrastructure node without creating a service interruption.

• Automation and analytics. Being able to manage and allocate infrastructure resources based on demand is essential. You also need to be able to analyze and define how information is moving, and insure that required service levels are being met.

Talk to Unitiv about these concerns, and make sure these issues are adequately addressed.