Need stability, scalability, high availability, and control? Here is how Atlassian Data Center can help

In February 2021, Atlassian Server officially retired and this means organizations can no longer buy new Atlassian (Core) Server licenses (such as Jira, Confluence BitBucket, JSM) as the product has now reached end-of-life (EOL). While customers can still upgrade or downgrade their Server licenses and maintenance, support will continue to be available for the next three years, and Server customers can continue to purchase additional functionality and apps via the Atlassian Marketplace. Atlassian’s ultimate goal is to move customers either to its Atlassian SaaS product or to Atlassian Data Center (allowing customers  to host where they want).

Those organizations unable to move to a cloud environment (SaaS), or those who want to take a slower transition to the cloud, either because of IP issues or because they work in highly regulated industries, should seriously consider a move to Atlassian Data Center. This not only provides high levels of stability, scalability and high availability, it enables IT teams to maintain control, stay abreast of ever-increasing demands and more effectively plan ahead.

Handling capacity and performance challenges

We all know that as a business grows, the weight of the load on its servers inevitably grows as well, with users simultaneously accessing the intranet and applications. This rapid scaling can bring about an array of capacity and performance challenges, resulting in latency issues, poor performance and can even create downtime. This is one of the reasons Atlassian Data Center uses multiple node clusters to manage heavy workloads, providing users with the ability to run on multiple nodes with externalized data stores. 

For enterprises operating in highly regulated industries such as finance, healthcare, or government sectors, compliance is critical. But even for those who are not, adherence to complex policies is often still required. Atlassian Data Center provides features such as advanced auditing and enterprise user management, removing the hassle of staying secure and compliant. Data Center will continue to offer enterprises who need strict control over data residency and full control over deployment location. Data Center can be hosted on-premise via an enterprise’s own data center, or on cloud infrastructure services.

Designed for mission-critical deployments

Ultimately, Atlassian Data Center is designed for mission-critical deployments that support the unique and complex requirements of enterprise organizations. Data Center takes the Server variant of Atlassian tools and builds in high performance and availability. This allows for flexibility with deployments and because Data Center has multiple nodes, this means that if one fails, the others keep the service running.

Most enterprises are dealing with large, complex, growing, and/or geographically distributed teams. And if those teams need products to get their work done, any performance or availability issues can mean a huge loss in productivity.

Peak loads can degrade product performance.

One major culprit of performance issues is concurrent usage. Under high load or at peak times, a product’s performance is at risk of degrading, which can be frustrating for users who are trying to get work done.  Data Center can be deployed in a clustered environment, which provides better support and the capacity to scale across multiple nodes, giving IT teams and users a faster, more seamless experience. Likewise, when an application runs slowly, users become less productive. Studies show that a user will start on another activity if their system takes more than about twenty seconds to respond, although frustration will set in much sooner than that. This user frustration can result in a decline in confidence in IT systems and products, and ultimately a decline in confidence in the organization.

While speed and performance are critical, organizations may see an even bigger hit to productivity if they experience any downtime. For users who rely on certain products to get work done, even a few minutes of downtime can represent a huge monetary loss for the business. For example, the cost of employees’ lost time is just a fraction of the cost of an outage. The true cost is probably much higher because of factors such as loss of business, reputational damage and regulatory fines.

That’s why ensuring the reliability and availability of products is crucial. With Data Center active clustering the load balancer will automatically redirect traffic from a failed node to an active node in the cluster, meaning uninterrupted access for your users. 

Maintaining control over customization and operations management 

Many enterprises operate highly customized application environments which cannot easily be migrated and operated via cloud services. Although some organizations will plan a strategy to replicate this in the cloud, Atlassian Data Center can be an option to support such customers. Similarly, enterprises may have strict change control processes and need to tightly manage the introduction of upgrades and new features which sometimes make a cloud deployment unsuitable. Deploying Atlassian Data Center allows users full control of operations management to suit requirements.

Lastly, if an organization is growing and adding more users scaling with Atlassian Data Center is quick and easy. They can add nodes to clusters without any downtime in order to easily scale products and get them in the hands of the people and teams that need them.

There are a lot of different paths for enterprises to go down and Atlassian Data Center certainly helps organizations to quickly scale, maintaining an agile environment while ensuring productivity and maximum uptime. Big savings in time and improvements to productivity are important for every business, but are perhaps even more essential at the enterprise level, where productivity boosts can grow exponentially and give the business an important competitive advantage which is critical in the current environment.

Paul Renshaw is Chief Revenue Officer, Clearvision