xTECH360
Best Practices for Modernizing Data Centers

In the new world order of unrelenting competition, “flexibility and speed are elementary for advancement.”

The data center is fast progressing into a much bigger environment with companies using tools that reside in individual clouds to support their data and the way their applications work. As the data centers expanded beyond the walled environment and out into the cloud, businesses need new mechanisms, tools, and processes to provide reliable services in this expanded environment. With first-rate operational excellence, US-based xTech360’s expertise lies in managing the operations in and beyond the data center for companies across North America and Europe. Whether it is providing integration, migration, or configuring a new environment for the client, xTECH360’s expertise spans all operations. “We work closely with our clients and strive to become members of a single team. xTECH360 can collaborate, provide advice and counsel, new directions, and information about the IT industry. By filling services, technology or support gaps, we become a supporting player to help businesses reach their goals,” says Dan Swaney, CEO of xTECH360.

As a managed service provider, xTECH360’s focus is on making its team nimble enough to be able to react quickly to get the job completed, as long-term service provider contracts are being replaced by much shorter projects, transformations, migrations and integrations. “We know that the infrastructure environments of old moved extremely slow, environments in today’s cloud need to be setup faster to keep up with business needs,” mentions Swaney. To achieve speed of execution, xTECH360’s operational processes have gone through a revamp in an effort to streamline them, making them more responsive and faster for their clients.

Bearing in mind the mission to deliver industry-leading solutions that contribute to clients’ success, xTECH360 forged a strong partnership with Red Hat, a big participant of the industry standard with its open source offerings. Red Hat’s culture of openness fits nicely with xTECH360’s culture of collaboration. xTECH360’s extensive solution stack includes: OpenShift for hybrid cloud, enterprise containers, OpenStack for building and managing public and private clouds, Ansible to automate all aspects of IT, Satellite for infrastructure management, and CloudForms to provide unified provisioning and management of hybrid cloud environments.

With the intent to maintain the flexibility of platforms within the datacenter, xTECH360 works on being more responsive and innovative with their provisioning across several environments. “We are able to operate across many industries such as manufacturing, distribution, and financial institutions because we do not deal with applications, which become more specific going up the software stack,” says Swaney. It deals with operations much below the application level, at the software stack, the operating system, and the infrastructure level.

We are able to operate across many industries such as manufacturing, distribution, and financial institutions because we do not deal with applications, which become more specific going up the software stack

Swaney illustrates xTECH360’s operational excellence with an instance where they had to design and deliver a cloud solution foran energy company. The client’s objective was to migrate from traditional multi-tier applications to a cloud infrastructure in addition to delivering scalable in-memory databases for HANA. Upon engagement with the energy company, xTECH360 devised and built them a converged infrastructure, taking into consideration new and evolving federal compliance requirements in the utility industry. The new high availability and resilient infrastructure simplified the client’s architecture enabling business continuity and automation of their disaster recovery process between two geographic locations.

The strategic plan for xTECH360 in the near future is to continue their efforts of expanding their customer base as well as driving innovations with their current clientele for operational process improvements and cost savings. With everything turning into a hybrid cloud, the next frontier for the company is to expand its operational capabilities in addition to devising the next best practices and policies around managing the hybrid cloud as well as the multicloud environment for clients.