Atlassian Data Center : What are the benefits of Data Center over Server deployments?

Objective

What are the benefits of Data Center over Server deployments?

Environment

Data Center

Procedure

Atlassian Data Center is our enterprise solution designed for customers that need the final step in scaling Atlassian: providing true high availability and building a more robust infrastructure to support uptime and performance needs. The primary benefits of Data Center deployments include:

High Availability

Data Center helps you achieve high availability through active clustering and automatic hot failover within your data center. Cluster multiple active servers to ensure uninterrupted access to critical Atlassian applications in case of a hardware failure. If a node fails, the load balancer will automatically redirect users to another active node in the pool, or cluster. Most users won’t notice any downtime since they’re automatically directed from the failed node to an active node. Use industry standard load-balancing, database clustering and shared files systems to minimize single points of failure.

Performance at Scale

Each node in a Data Center cluster increases capacity for concurrent users so you can scale your Atlassian application without sacrificing performance. You can dedicate nodes in your cluster for automated tasks or route certain types of traffic – particular teams, or API traffic to specific nodes, while driving the remaining traffic to others to provide the highest quality of service. Avoid performance degradation during load spikes by increasing application throughput.

Instant Scalability

Easily add new nodes to your Data Center cluster without any downtime or interruption to services. Existing nodes in the cluster will automatically sync indexes and plugins with each new member giving you a hassle-free deployment and ensuring users have maximum uptime. And since Data Center is licensed by user count, you can better predict costs and scale your environment without extra licensing fees for new servers or CPU.

Disaster Recovery

Atlassian’s Data Center gives you the ability to have a “cold standby” disaster recovery site for use in a system outage. This means the disaster recovery site is located separately from production and is only on when it’s needed. You can use whichever processes work best for you for replicating your database and shared file system from production to the disaster recovery site. While you might have a disaster recovery (DR) strategy in place for your current Atlassian environment, with Data Center you’re able to share application indexes from your production instance with your DR backup besides copying the database and shared storage folders. So in case you need to do a failover, these indexes dramatically reduce the startup time of your DR backup. If a disaster occurs, you can redirect users to the DR system and back on-line within no time. It's recovery at the flick of a switch.