Solution Brief
Flex data center racks and enclosures
Adapt for success in the digital economy
The emerging digital economy presents new business challenges across industries and company types. Companies must sustain business growth — which can be especially challenging at scale — while also finding new ways to reduce costs, speed time to market, and improve efficiency.
Communications service providers (CSPs) can capitalize on the growing demand for digital services while identifying new ways to compete with over-the-top (OTT) providers, gain market share, introduce new services, increase retention, and monetize their infrastructure and connectivity.
These challenges require digital transformation from your IT organization and environment to remain competitive. This involves challenging your technical staff to use your data centers in new ways to provide business agility and speed.
In the white paper, you’ll find:
- How you can digitally transform your business with cloud technologies
- Help identifying the changes to your infrastructure required to deal with the complexity of moving from traditional, integrated systems to a decoupled cloud infrastructure
- Discusses what is required to choose the right cloud solution including hardware, software, flexibility, and ecosystem
Digitally transform your business with cloud technologies
Cloud technologies can help companies operate more flexibly and cost-effectively, but building an effective, secure, and reliable cloud environment can be challenging. Deploying cloud infrastructure requires significant expertise, research, integration work, and testing.
A trusted partner with experience designing and building cloud data centers can help you cut your costs and speed your time to market. Our cloud solutions and operations are built to scale — whether you need a custom solution or one based on an existing reference design.
Before deploying a cloud environment, consider how the changes in infrastructure will affect your organization and operations. How will you deploy and scale quickly and effectively? What customizations will you need to meet your business requirements? How will you incorporate edge deployments? What’s the best way to integrate cloud concepts into your existing environment and operations? How will you reintegrate new technologies, vendors, and processes into a cohesive environment? And finally, what methods will you use to take advantage of the economies of scale enabled by the cloud?
Sketch your path to the cloud
Planning is essential to successful cloud implementation. Your hardware and software foundation, overall flexibility, and technology ecosystem will affect how well your new cloud environment supports your business needs.
Working with a trusted cloud technology vendor like Flex can help you deploy an effective cloud infrastructure faster.
We deliver design, engineering, manufacturing, real-time supply chain insight, and logistics services at the global scale to companies of all sizes in various industries and end-markets.
Wherever you are in your cloud journey, you can bring us an idea of where you want to go, a sketch of your desired environment, or even a full architecture plan. We’ll help you design, build, deploy, and scale a cloud environment that fits your needs. Our product lifecycle solutions provide custom design and deployment services for your entire cloud environment, from rack- to node-level infrastructure.
Additionally, our labs provide engineering and design services to enhance rack-level solutions. They also let you test the latest technologies in a controlled environment, so you can benchmark and optimize performance for your specific workloads.
Digitally transform your business
Our cloud solutions and services combine hardware and software interoperability, infrastructure flexibility, and ecosystem partnership.
Putting hardware in place
Cloud innovation starts at the physical infrastructure level. The economics of data centers is driving companies to deploy standards-based, custom-designed servers that allow them to take advantage of new designs, platforms, and devices. To make this move to commodity servers, several hardware standards have emerged.
Open Compute Project (OCP)
OCP is a collaborative community focused on redesigning hardware technology to support the growing demands on compute infrastructure. OCP creates efficient, flexible designs for scalable computing that make it possible for more organizations to transition from proprietary systems to open, standards-based commodity hardware.
Central Office Re-architected as a Data Center (CORD)
CORD is an organization that is building a reference implementation based on commodity servers, white-box switches, disaggregated access technologies, and open source software. The goal is to bring data center economies and cloud agility to service providers. This reference implementation will serve as a complete, general-purpose platform for innovative services.
Open19™ Foundation
Open19™ Foundation is an organization that is defining a common, cross-industry server platform based on a standard 19” rack with modular components for building flexible, economic data centers and edge solutions.
We are a founding member of the Open19™ Foundation, a platinum member of the OCP, and a collaborator in CORD. Our solutions are based on these standards, giving you more flexibility for your cloud foundation. Additionally, our custom-design services for hardware let you deploy the exact capabilities you need and incorporate the latest innovations faster.
Flexibility copes with uncertainty
When launching new services and products, you can’t always be sure how, where, or when they will grow. Users might quickly adopt in one region but might stall in another. Unexpected events and competitive products can also affect growth and acceptance.
A strong supply chain partner helps you cope with this uncertainty by providing flexibility in the timing of your infrastructure investments without impacting your business. We have a worldwide manufacturing and deployment presence, providing supply chain agility, scalability, and reliability.
At ~100 sites in 30 countries, our global footprint lets you take advantage of local and regional manufacturing capabilities for faster delivery, cost efficiencies, tax advantages, and protection from unexpected global events.
Ecosystem
Cloud technologies are inherently collaborative. In fact, many of the most popular cloud technologies are developed in collective communities of businesses, individuals, and industry organizations. At the same time, many new networking and compute suppliers are emerging. As a result, the lines between traditional segments are blurring, and competition is increasing.
To succeed, you need partners and vendors that can adapt quickly to both technological and market changes. We foster a rich ecosystem of supply partners that allows you to take advantage of the latest technology advancements, regardless of supplier.
We are a company that serves thousands of customers, allowing us to apply our broad experience and best practices across technologies, industries, and use cases. We have experience working across the industries of networking communications, cloud and data center, medical, automotive, industrial, and consumer.
Transform your business
No matter which industry you’re in, digital transformation is essential for success. While cloud technologies form an ideal foundation for digital operations, they can be challenging to deploy effectively. Choosing the right solution can help you transform faster while also preparing your organization for the future. We have the expertise and capabilities to help you build and operate the ideal cloud environment for your business — faster.
