Big, bigger, exabyte. Why big data management is more critical than ever.
Data, data everywhere! Without it, we’d be stuck. Just a few years ago, a 1 GB USB stick was the perfect give-away, but today people would turn their noses up at it. Data volumes are sky-rocketing and petabyte and exabyte capacities are becoming more normal. But how much data is an exabyte? Sounds like the penultimate question on Who Wants to be a Millionaire, doesn’t it?
Let’s break it down. 1 exabyte is equal to 1018 bytes or one billion gigabytes. Or in other words, quite a few USB sticks, back in the day! The magnitude can perhaps be better illustrated with this example—in order to record an exabyte of data, you would have had to start a video conference about 237 thousand years ago.[1]
This brief introduction to the world of storage capacities is important to understand why data centres and their operations are essential for enhancing the customer experience and boosting corporate success. In a globally dispersed infrastructure, data must be secure and performant across on-premise data centres, cloud applications and service providers. This can, however, be a huge load on network operations.
Add to this the considerable shift in the way we shop, learn, do banking, work, etc. With multi-cloud solutions, businesses can decide where they place their workloads at the edge of the data centre or in the cloud. What’s more, many companies use hybrid data centre environments. The security, stability and agility of today’s data centres must be a top priority for operators.
It could all be so easy.
According to a study by Cisco Systems, in 2021 there are around 403 exabytes of big data stored in data centres around the world.[2] Not something you can easily carry around on 1 gigabyte thumb drives. What we need are excellent software and hardware solutions.
Cisco’s DAY 2 OPERATIONS are analytics tools for the corporate hardware and software needed in data centres and cloud networks used to gain a deeper understanding of a networks components and their properties. By leveraging the solutions telemetry and automation capabilities, IT organisations can better focus on the company’s strategic objectives and create an optimised customer experience, lower costs and ensure continuity and compliance.
[1] What is an Exabyte? How Big Is It Really? (backblaze.com)
[2] Data centres - Volumes of big data saved worldwide in 2021 | Statista
Bild: Cisco Nexus Dashboard von Cisco ensures better collaboration between teams.
Combined with a Nexus Dashboard, the result is unified and proactive data centre operations. The agile automation platform gives users quick access to services and tools provided via the data centre network.. This central management console allows network admins to easily access applications—from deployment and troubleshooting to in-depth insights into their own network. It’s so simple even multiple tools can be integrated into the data centre with insights into network management, monitoring and troubleshooting visible through a single pane of glass.
Users can run these services across sites and quickly resolve issues, with a quick glance enough to stay up-to-date on the status of the various infrastructure services. User-friendly panels and dashboards allow customised views. Could it be any simpler?
Anomalies were yesterday’s news. Today, troubleshooting runs in the background.
Detecting issues before they become problems is a dream for many businesses as downtime, production stoppages and delivery problems caused by technical issues can cause a real headache. Today’s customers expect the order process to be smooth and delivery to be fast and can lose faith in companies and services at the drop of a hat. Trying to revive a bruised reputation takes time, money and a lot of patience. To make sure things never get this far, it’s worth investing in analysis and monitoring tools.
Having complete transparency into the data centre network helps to find any blind spots caused, for example, by incorrect configurations. By leveraging forensic approaches, network admins can travel back in time to discover the root cause of any issues and take steps to remedy them.
The Cisco Nexus Dashboard can monitor data centres dispersed across several locations and visualise the entire system’s status. It also gives admins the possibility to configure and monitor all resources, assign user roles, create personas and view details on resource usage across services. Two services—Cisco Multi-Site Orchestrator and Network Assurance Engine—are already integrated, while other services can be easily added from the cloud-based app store, Cisco DC App Center.
Another huge benefit of the dashboard is that it categorises anomalies according to type and retains their historical context. Any deviations from this are also classified as anomalies so that network admins can easily track deviations, adjust configurations and resolve the underlying issue. Nexus Dashboard enables you to see all kinds of anomalies that may occur on the app or network layers through a single pane of glass and nip any potential disruption to business-critical applications in the bud, true to the motto the best form of troubleshooting is the one you don’t notice.
The simplicity of the multi-cloud age.
No matter if hybrid, virtual or exclusively in the cloud, network admins need a scalable toolset that delivers actionable insights and quickly pick up on network problems. Even when the network harbours a large volume of operational service data, this if no use when the existing tools cannot understand them. After all, protocols and information can be difficult to figure out when they are not logically organised, analysed and visualised.
This is where Cisco solutions come in, simplifying data centre operations with intuitive, centralised tools like the Nexus Dashboard, helping you to benefit from the many advantages of the multi-cloud and design a future-proof solution.
