1. General Datatech

Cainites is on a constant quest to identify the emerging players in the Data center and showcase their expertise, products, services, and solutions in solving impediments and overcoming market complexities. Through the Two-page profile, our aim is to allow the readers, your prospective clients, and business partners to develop a thorough understanding of GDT and its value proposition in Data center. The profile will illustrate the functionality of your solutions and services, along with insights into the company's strengths, vision, and roadmap.

For the following questions, we are looking for insightful responses that paint a picture of the role played by GDT in addressing customers’ needs within the Data center landscape.

After covering all the questions, please share your views and opinion on any other topic that we may have missed and that you think the readers should know about.

1. What should be the storyline of this article?

The evolution of the data center – from on-prem to cloud to hybrid cloud

As the focal point of innovation, the Data Center has undergone constant change, and the traditional data center is no longer what it used to be.  Today, many companies use the hybrid cloud for their design centers and, more often, customers are using the hybrid multicloud for design and deployment.  Companies are finding the right balance of on premise and off-prem workload placement.  Done correctly, the right balance of cost control, simplified operations, robust security and, increasingly, sustainability, can be achieved.

GDT’s guiding principles are to modernize everything and optimize everywhere.

2. What are some of the trends that you expect to impact Data Center solutions this year and how is GDT planning to leverage these trends and evolve?

It’s all about the data.

We see several trends, solutions, and services that are commonly being implemented.  These distill down to four areas that are aligned to the market and our customers journeys: 1) Cyber Resiliency and Recovery, 2) Cloud Repatriation/Cloud Optimization, 3) The Growth of Data, and 4) The Rise of AI in the Enterprise.

First, cyber security and resilience are top of mind for IT leaders and business executives in every organization. Recent newsworthy cyber-attacks highlight the need for modern features such as zero trust architectures, secure edge, robust identity management, and tight security controls. They also are reminders of the importance of the ability to ensure efficient system recoveries to a known recovery point within a specific amount of time.  It is far more likely that an organization will enact a disaster recovery/ business continuance plan because of cyber-attacks rather than almost any other disaster.

There is a cognitive disconnect where greater than 90% of companies surveyed indicate their recovery tools are sufficient, yet nearly 50% have been successfully attacked. Of those that have been attacked half lost their data and roughly two-thirds have paid a ransom.  Data recoverability is a strategic capability.

Second, we see the continued growth of cloud adoption and modern application development driving many decisions, but as cloud adoption has become more mature, we are seeing the need to balance cloud spend and to increase cloud repatriation efforts.  The CAGR for cloud repatriation is approximately 22% which we see as a healthy indicator of cloud and hybrid cloud maturity.  Andreesen Horowitz noted in its blog that companies should optimize their cloud deployments, set KPIs on cloud spend, incentivize behavior, and plan repatriation, before migrating to the cloud. They should also have the ability and flexibility to selectively repatriate, as their business needs change, to assure alignment of their investments/ costs with their desired outcomes. 

Hybrid cloud is the model that gives organizations the flexibility to optimize and control their workloads and find their specific balance.  Depending on the survey, hybrid cloud/hybrid multicloud deployments account for 77% to 82% of enterprise architectures.  We believe this is the correct model for the foreseeable future, as it allows a company to balance cost, performance, security, compliance, and control of data.

Cloud can be an amazing way of operating, especially when companies are set up with a balanced cloud experience.  GDT has the experience and capabilities to facilitate and optimize the move to cloud, including migration planning, security, architecture reviews, FinOps, and other ancillary services.

Third is the unfettered growth of data. By the 2030s, the world will generate around a yottabyte of data per year, according to Scientific American. We call it the Yottabyte challenge, and we believe it is having a very real impact.  For reference, one Yottabyte is one trillion terabytes.  To put this in a relatable context, it is the equivalent of a stack of 1,000,000,000,000 laptops similar to yours, each with a 1 TB SSD, that goes to and from the moon more than 22x.  

The challenge, according to Seagate, is that only 32% of data available to the enterprise is put to work, the remaining 68% goes unleveraged. This has significant cost ramifications for on premise data storage and backup, emphasizing the importance of modernizing storage platforms, adopting capacity optimized solutions, and implementing other cost-effective tools.  It also provides the opportunity to develop data management strategies to help control costs and rationalize investments correctly, which could include the classification and categorization of data, data tagging (with direct impact on FinOps as a pre-requisite activity), tiering evaluation, and archiving viability.  

Another source of increasing cloud cost is due to data growth.  94% of the companies interviewed by Virtana indicate that their cloud costs are rising, and 54% indicate that their cloud-based storage costs are rising at a faster rate than their overall cloud costs. When 69% of those organizations indicate that storage accounts for more than one-quarter of their cloud costs, and when 57% of enterprise data is already in the cloud, this becomes an area of vital importance.  

The last item that is directly impacted by the unfettered growth of data is ESG reporting.  We know that the strategic business priorities of Social Responsibility/ESG and

Environmental Sustainability have risen 292% in priority among CEOs from 2020 through 2022.  With SEC Scope 1 and Scope 2 reporting in place for FY24, we see this as an area of increasing importance to address.  The estimates vary, but perhaps a “best case” scenario is that the ICT (Information and Communication Technology) will consume ~8% of the world’s electricity by 2030, up from 2% in 2020.  Storage, specifically as a percentage of Data Center energy consumption, will continue to grow and, according to Gartner, could account for 38% of all Data Center power requirements in 2030.

It is imperative to control the cost curves both on premise as well as in the cloud. Additionally, let’s not forget that with data comes compliance, data protection and recovery. All of these items need to be managed as part of one comprehensive data management program, ensuring strategic alignment with business needs and growth, while optimizing data-related expenses.

The fourth trend we see is the rise of AI in the Enterprise.  AI, thanks to ChatGPT/OpenAI has become a household word.  This is a transformational set of technologies, and we see AI, in general, ideally suited for a hybrid cloud world.  Generative AI will only increase the amount of data being created, with the aforementioned estimate of 1 Yottabyte of new data generated in the year 2030, up from a forecast of 175 Zettabytes in 2025. AI workloads will transform how companies operate, and data will be the fuel.  Consider the innovation impact of NVIDIA’s Omniverse and its concept of a digital twin, compared to the higher bandwidth connectivity and GPU/ CPU compute. We are at the beginning of AI fueled architectures.  From pre-processing, data prep, and ingest through learning, evaluation, and prediction, the Data Center is no longer the “place” for the compute, the Data Center will become the computer.  

Many of the artifacts we deal with today will continue to serve the AI fueled enterprise, but they will also require us to build at levels of scale and performance that historically were reserved for national laboratories. As market trends for the Data Center evolve, GDT remains focused on its guiding principles to modernize everything and optimize everywhere - starting with these four main areas.

3. In your interactions with leading company decision-makers, what sense do you get of the challenges they face now in the Data center space and how are GDT effectively addressing these issues?

Decision makers are faced with a myriad of priorities, which can be considered conflicting:

• Cost control

• Improved and enhanced security

• Skill set shortages

• Business agility 

• The need to simplify and automate 

GDT is well positioned to address these areas, and we start our engagements with an assessment or workshop to better understand how our customers use their data.  We keep it simple, putting together a realistic plan to take our customers from their current state to their desired future state.  We build solutions based on our decades of experience and thousands of engagements.  We are able to do this via our technology partnerships which provide technical enablement, relevant professional competencies, and appropriate managed services -- delivering better results in a shorter timeframe.

4 “We seamlessly wrap multi-cloud and data center services into one secure architecture to deliver the scalability, speed and accessibility you need, no matter where you are in the world.” 

Please elaborate on the statement by citing one or two case studies and walking us through them, based on key strategies, methodology, features, and benefits, reflecting how you have enabled clients to overcome hurdles and attain desired outcomes with your innovative array of solutions.

5. Retail:

GDT engaged with a well-known global convenience store chain to consolidate two different technology environments, resulting in lowered risk and improved efficiency. We performed assessments across three public cloud providers and, based on our findings and full analysis, we provided documentation for various network topologies between the cloud providers and the related network services. This included documentation of each subscription for on premise connectivity, reflecting traffic flow and recommendations for a baseline security model moving forward. The implementation resulted in $1.7M in future savings.  

   High Tech/EDA:

GDT worked with a US-based Fortune 100 EDA chip manufacturer to update and right-size their storage environment that supported their simulation farm.  This analysis allowed the customer to re-allocate workloads to more appropriate storage tiers, mitigating latency and overprovisioning. Results include: 

• Increased overall performance and shorter “tape-out” time for the simulation farm

• Visibility that allowed workloads to be relocated to the right tier for performance, freeing up resources in the appropriate locations

• Improved ROI and better financial forecasting for growth

• A service catalog of storage resources that matched the right workloads to the right performance tiers

This engagement led to standards being set, allowing better financial forecasting and budget planning.  Additional benefits were simplified internal workflows, establishment of a service catalog for storage, departmental showback/chargeback, and improved alignment with the infrastructure team. As an iterative process, the customer has annually optimized its storage environment for a few years in a row, reducing excessive spending in spite of increased data volume.

6. There are a number of companies out there that are vying for the top position. What are the strategies employed by GDT to thwart market competition and what according to you are the distinct features of GDT's differentiating factors that give it a competitive edge?

GDT immerses itself in its customers’ environments to maximize collaboration and to better understand the customers’ use of data. We follow our principles to “modernize everything and optimize everywhere”, which helps us identify the right architectural frameworks to lower the cost of operations, improve security, simplify and reduce complexity, and keep customers in control of their workloads. We are the right partner that has the right partnerships, the right capabilities and services, and the right experience to instill confidence. 

7. What does the future hold for your organization? Any footprint expansion plans or platform enhancement strategies that you can shed light upon?

GDT listens to our customers and the industry chatter. It’s an ongoing process that provides insights into how we should continue to develop our offerings, managed services, and partnerships. Our recent NaaS (Network as a Service) offering reflects exactly that – there was a market gap, and we were agile enough to address it almost immediately. In the same manner, we are currently investing in our internal use of AI, automation, and tools. 

By constantly listening, we will always be aware of dynamic market changes and will respond by continually adjusting our technology partnerships. This allows us to provide the most current services that are in-demand. To enable our responsiveness, we are investing in our team in the US and increasing investments in our offshore team in India, planning to double over the next year.  This means we will be able to listen better and respond quickly by providing more expertise, more coverage, and more services with quality -- at scale.  

8. Is there anything more that you would like to add or highlight your product? Is there any other exciting insight you would like us to discuss in the story that we may have missed in this questionnaire?

As an organization we live by the motto, “communicate, build trust, have fun.”  This is reflected in how we operate.  It starts with strong internal communications between our technical, support, and sales teams.  It grows into effective external communications with our partners, and it ultimately manifests itself when we serve the needs of our customers.  Communication is the foundation of trust, and trust is the currency of our business.  Our teamwork relies on trust, partnerships thrive on trust, and customers earn our trust.  Building relationships on trust is the first principle of business.  The fun part is that we get to help our customers succeed in a variety of ways that are mutually satisfying and meaningful.  These principles are what attracts and retains our team and our customers, in addition to our expertise in technology and our customer-first services.