Keeping your business connected
Dimension Data’s Advanced Infrastructure business presents a wide array of infrastructure services to keep your business connected, all the time, wherever you may be located – allowing you to focus on the core aspects of your operations.
Whether your primary needs are cost-efficiency, flexibility, speed of deployment, high-performance, watertight security, or guaranteed uptime, Dimension Data’s wealth of experience in the field of Advanced Infrastructure enables it to cater for any of your requirements.
Advanced Infrastructure at a Glance
The ICT Infrastructure has become the foundation upon which the business estate is built. It has had to evolve from a static hardware platform into a dynamic business enabler in its own right, critical for the support of a number of business-centric objectives.
Dimension Data’s Advanced Infrastructure team has an approach of consultation and implementation with proactive steps to ensure that your physical ICT infrastructure provides for your existing requirements. Coupled with this is our drive to continually incorporate new technologies, design and best practice architectures into our offerings for our clients to address pressures around cost control, increased power consumption, scalability, and flexibility.
Communication Cabling
The demands placed on organisations’ cabling systems are increasing every year as faster standards are adopted. Dimension Data’s proven track record or engineering cabling skills across the African continent is based on our approach of deploying flexible cabling systems to support an organisation’s needs not just for today, but for tomorrow as well.
Energy Management
Dimension Data has developed an intelligent set of technologies geared to reduce the impact of an ‘always on’ power requirement to contain usage, associated costs and carbon emissions. This new generation of Energy Management systems combines building management systems and advanced software solutions to manage your building’s functions in a more energy-efficient manner, providing demand-response controls when situations within the power grid demand it.
Wireless Connectivity
Wireless connectivity has certainly come of age. Whether it is campus installations, metropolitan area networks, or last mile connectivity, wireless is now often the most viable option. Consider wireless connectivity solutions to realise the benefits of quicker deployments, reduced cost of ownership, great returns on investment, and high-speed connectivity.
Integrated Security Solutions
Developing a cumbersome mix of separate IT security solutions can happen all too easily in large and in growing organisations. Dimension Data’s Integrated Security Solutions reduce this complexity and its associated risks with converged physical and IT security technologies – spanning physical access, logical access, video surveillance, identity management and more.
Data Centre in-a-Container
When physical constraints, or time and cost pressures make expanding a data centre unviable, Dimension Data’s innovative Data Centre in-a-Container solutions offer a high-performance alternative. The design of this data centre, built in a standard shipping container, can be tailor-made to suit an organisation’s unique requirements for power and cooling, power management, security, environmental monitoring, among other considerations.
Data Centre Infrastructure
Modern data centre infrastructures have evolved – becoming both more critical and complex in the process and so have their requirements. With the benefits of new technologies and standards, come increased requirements for seamless scalability, temperature control, uninterrupted power supply, efficient space planning and, most important of all, 24/7 uptime.
Your business could benefit from our 10 years’ worth of experience in consulting, building and managing Data Centre Infrastructure solutions. Our expertise includes calculating Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and delivering maximum Coefficients of Performance (COP) on the cooling side for our clients. Our experience and expertise to improve the efficiency, performance and agility of your data centre will provide you with the scalability and effeciencies you require.
Portable Facilities Cabinet
Dimension Data’s Portable Facilities Cabinet provides a complete physical networking server environment in a box, reducing your upfront costs and eliminating the need to coordinate numerous specialists implementing separate infrastructure solutions – like building, flooring, air conditioning, electrical reticulation, security, fire protection, power enhancement and site monitoring, for instance.
Managed Services
Dimension Data’s Managed Services provide specialised IT support to ensure that an organisation’s data centre infrastructures continue running optimally at all times – by proactively detecting any problems, deploying expert resources, and timeously fixing the problem.
International best-practices
Current Global and local trends around ‘Green’ Data Centres and the impact of the power utility’s price hikes, have significantly impacted the way organisations design, implement and manage their Data Centres.
Dimension Data Advanced Infrastructure business has been building Data Centre Infrastructure environments for the past 12 years and is well positioned to assist organisations with the challenges they face with regard to cost- and power-efficiency, flexibility, speed of deployment, high-performance, watertight security, or guaranteed uptime.
Benefits of using Dimension Data Advanced Infrastructure:
• Our solutions utilise best international practices for Data Centre Design and we have Certified Solutions Architects to assist in design and consultancy services.
• We use best of breed products and solutions to ensure organisations access to the latest technology at competitive prices. These solutions are focused on high efficiency and in line with Green Data Centre design practices.
Cost, power and environmental footprint
Three common concerns, a simple technology solution
No matter the size of the business, its core markets or geographic spread, it’s almost always the case that three primary drivers will be keeping its decision-makers awake at night, and driving many of their technology purchases and future strategy.
These are cost, power and environmental footprint. It is a multifaceted problem and although most businesses assess their risk and exposure to each factor separately, often the solutions and strategy involved in addressing them are very closely linked.
Cost is a margin that affects competitiveness… power and energy consumption are huge concerns in a resource-hungry world, and growing environmental and regulatory pressures are squeezing boardroom agendas and having an immense effect on policy and buying decisions.
Dimension Data has a great understanding of how these factors play together to affect business outcomes, and our strong vendor partnerships and ongoing investment in the right technologies can work to the benefit of our clients who are grappling with these exact questions.
One of our clients that has used technology to address the cost, power and environmental challenges facing its business is the FirstRand Group. This successful financial services group is one of the top ten listed companies on the Johannesburg Securities Exchange, and includes iconic financial services brands like First National Bank and Rand Merchant Bank.
By using consolidation technologies, it was able to consolidate four separate data centres into a single, state-of-the-art facility that serves its entire business’ infrastructure needs. Consolidating the physical area occupied by the separate data centres has freed up valuable office space for its expanding business, where floor space is at a premium and extremely costly.
And aside from consuming less physical resources, consolidating the data centre means that less energy resources are used as well. By using a high density rack design with APC’s NetShelter enclosures, we were able to reduce 260 racks to just 113, with proper power, cooling, connectivity and manageability, and Tier 4 redundancy.
This has reduced the data centre footprint to the bare minimum, and greater efficiencies in cooling, power and energy consumption have slashed operational costs. Best of all, these cost, power and Green IT advances come with significant technology gains too – including a greatly reduced risk of systems failure and data loss, and an inbuilt capacity to cater for the future growth of the business.
With South Africans anticipating renewed power supply problems from 2011, cost pressures increasing and environmental regulation imposing greater rules and constraints on the way we do business, Dimension Data already has the solution sets and technology answers for our clients. Our vision of business-enabling technology is within reach.
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