What is a
Virtual Data Center?

A virtual data center offers the capabilities of a traditional data center, but using cloud-based resources instead of physical resources. It provides an organization with the ability to deploy additional infrastructure resources at need without acquiring, deploying, configuring, and maintaining physical appliances

his enables organizations to take advantage of the flexibility, scalability, and cost savings of cloud computing.

How Does a Virtual Data Center Work?

A data center architecture is designed to provide an organization with certain types of resources. These include processing power, also called “compute” (CPU), storage (RAM and disk space), and networking connectivity.

While an organization can deploy all of these resources in an on-prem data center, these same resources are available for lease in the cloud. Instead of purchasing and maintaining their own physical infrastructure, virtual data centers allow organizations to rent virtual infrastructure from cloud providers at need.

Benefits of a Virtual Data Center

Virtual data centers provide a number of advantages over physical ones, including:

  • Flexibility and Scalability: Flexibility and scalability are the main selling points of the cloud. Virtual data centers, which are built using cloud resources, provide these same benefits.
  • Reduced Overhead: With an on-prem data center, an organization needs to acquire and deploy physical appliances to meet data center requirements. With a virtual data center, additional capacity can be leased at need, decreasing the overhead associated with maintaining a data center.
  • Simplified Management: In a virtual data center, the cloud provider is responsible for maintaining a significant portion of an organization’s infrastructure stack. This decreases the load on IT staff and allows the company to focus on its core business.
  • Improved Resiliency: Cloud providers are in the business of guaranteeing high availability and accessibility to their customers. Deploying data storage and applications in a virtual data center enables an organization to be more resilient than if they tried to host the same resources in a physical data center.
  • Business Focus: Most customers are not experts at purchasing, installing and maintaining physical data centers and thus need to hire specialist staff for this purpose. Transferring the responsibility to a cloud vendor means the company can focus only on their key business objectives without the distraction of managing physical infrastructure.