What is a Virtual Data Center?

A virtual data centre (VDC) is an abstraction of physical IT components that are designed to meet the business needs of companies. Virtualization technologies allow the VDC to offer the same computing as well as data storage, networking and data access capabilities as traditional IT infrastructure while reducing costs, complexity and maintenance.

Virtualization can speed up hardware provisioning and scaling on demand to accommodate business growth. It facilitates agile software development and DevOps explanation practices, making it an ideal fit for modern IT architecture. It also lowers IT support and costs, allowing businesses to spend more on innovation.

VDCs are either built on premises in a central location (private cloud) or hosted by third parties that provide cloud services to multiple companies at a time (public cloud). Virtualization can cut the cost of maintenance and operations in either scenario.

The hardware needed to build and install a VDC can be purchased from a vendor or leased from an IT managed services provider. It’s sometimes referred to as hyperconverged infrastructure, or HCI, since it blends storage, compute and networking equipment into one system that runs on software and can scale up or down.

A VDC can be run on a variety of operating systems, including Linux, Windows, and VMware. It is possible to deploy it as a hub-and-spoke network design, with the core infrastructure in the hub and applications and workloads in spokes. This type of architecture is a perfect fit for the roles and responsibilities of a company. It also offers lower expenses through centralization of data flows and components, as well as easier operations managing and compliance.