The solution provider looks to capitalize on a trend where 70 per cent of private cloud adopters will utilize third parties to manage their environments.
Kevin Leahy, Group general manager for Dimension Data’s Data Centre business unit
Global solutions and services provider Dimension Data has announced it is deploying globally standardized Managed Services for Data Centres, which manage server, storage and networks for on-premise, cloud and hybrid data centers.
“Dimension Data has been the leader in managed services for networking, but we didn’t have the rest of the components that sit inside the data center, such as servers and storage,” said Kevin Leahy, Group general manager for Dimension Data’s Data Centre business unit. “This allows us to bring together the in-prem assets, cloud and network into a single entity, which I believe is a first in the industry.”
The launch of this suite of managed services comes on the heels of Dimension Data’s announcement earlier this year that it would quadruple the size of its data centre business to U.S. $4 billion by 2018. The suite is the next step in a set of strategic initiatives to expand the Data Centre Group’s capability to consistently support domestic and multinational clients’ data centre transformation requirements.
“This is an automated platform that can monitor all devices in the data centre and integrate it with the network and cloud platform,” Leahy said. “It will be able to drive service management of the entire infrastructure.”
Leahy indicated that today’s trend is for their large clients to outsource their data centre management. A recent study by analyst firm TBR found that 70 per cent of private cloud adopters will utilize third parties to manage their environments.
“Many large clients buy direct from the vendor, but need help to automate their tiered storage infrastructure to build managed processes and services,” he said. “They need to be able to run the full stack with automation within specific domains and deploy it to a single service infrastructure, to drive a standard approach to event management.”
“Lots of large clients have standards, but no one is using them,” he added. “It is very rare to find a client using consistent standards as we do here. While North America is traditionally earlier adopters of technology, they still don’t want to invest three or four years to build out automated platform, even though they need it. We can manage on their premise but with standardized processes.”
The Dimension Data managed services supports multi-vendor environments including Cisco, EMC, HP, Dell, VCE, Microsoft, Red Hat, VMware, Citrix and NetApp.
