When most people hear the word “fabric,” they usually think of a piece of cloth made up of thousands of threads sewn together. However, when it comes to data center fabric, the term is used in relation to data centers as a metaphor for the many different connections made between the primary data center components. These data components include computing, networking, and software. For example, if you were to map all of these connections on paper, it would create a tightly woven fabric of connections, hence the name.
However, there’s much more to data fabric than that simple explanation. Today, we’ll examine data center fabric, what it is, and why companies use it.
What is data center fabric?
A more detailed explanation of data fabric is that it’s an end-to-end data integration and management solution. Data fabric consists of architecture, data management, and integration software. This shared data helps companies manage the continuous data that flows through their systems. In addition, an organized data fabric provides a unified, consistent user experience and grants data access to any member of that company, regardless of location, in real time.
The point of data center fabric is to help companies and organizations, such as enterprise data industry leader TIBCO, solve complicated data problems by better managing their data, whether it’s stored on applications, platforms, or physical locations. In the earlier days of the internet, companies focused on merely managing their data and occasionally extracting valuable insights from it. However, today, the focus is moving from only managing data and pulling insights to enhancing the quality of that data, providing more readily available information, and creating automated insight extraction from said data. With data center fabric, these objectives are much more possible.
Why should your company utilize data center fabric?
Any organization with a heavy focus on data needs its data to be accessible to users who need it, instead of having information hidden behind firewalls or spread out piece by piece in various locations. Companies need holistic data that provides complete integration of all of their data to meet business demands of consumer self-service, data automation, real-time connectivity, and universal data access. Unfortunately, although collecting data from separate sources isn’t always the problem, many companies can’t integrate, process, curate, or transform data from individual sources.
This essential part of data management is key to creating comprehensive analytics from customers, business partners, and products. A data center fabric provides the solution to this modern problem and gives companies a competitive advantage in their respective fields. As a result, they can meet their customers’ needs, modernize their systems, and have full access to data across the grid.
How does data center fabric work?
Before the time of integrated data solutions, data engineers had to pore over data in an attempt to pull insights from the data. Today, with solutions like data center fabric, obtaining analytics is much more sustainable than traditional data integration techniques. Data center fabrics act as an operational data layer to bring data together, transform it, and process it using machine learning (ML) to discover patterns and extract insights. As we mentioned, without a data fabric, all of this must happen by hand and through each application. Machine learning in data fabrics will preemptively provide the data and analytics to help critical decision-makers have better access to information faster. As a result, data center fabric can help discover hidden information from the data that would otherwise be missed unless it was explicitly sought out, making problem-solving and business insights much more straightforward.
Data center fabric is the future of data integration.
If your company doesn’t utilize data fabric to pull insights, find solutions to problems, or analyze customer data, you could potentially be missing valuable information. Industry leader TIBCO provides top-of-the-line data center fabric solutions so you can take your business into the 21st century.
