In February 2021, Atlassian Server officially retired. It means organisations 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). Customers can still upgrade or downgrade their Server licenses and maintenance. Additionally, 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 organisations 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. It provides high levels of stability, scalability and high availability. It also enables IT teams to maintain control, stay abreast of ever-increasing demands and more effectively plan ahead.
Handling capacity and performance challenges
As a business grows, the weight of the load on its servers also grows as users simultaneously access the intranet and applications. Rapid scaling can bring about an array of capacity and performance challenges. It can result 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. They provide users with the ability to run on multiple nodes with externalised 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. These remove the hassle of staying secure and compliant.
Data Center will continue to offer enterprises strict control over data residency and full control over deployment location. It can also be hosted on-premise via an enterprise’s own data centre, or on cloud infrastructure services.
Designed for mission-critical deployments
Ultimately, Atlassian Data Center is designed for mission-critical deployments that support enterprise organisations’ unique and complex requirements. Data Center takes the Server variant of Atlassian tools and builds in high performance and availability. It allows for flexibility with deployments. Additionally, as Data Center has multiple nodes, it means that the others keep the service running if one fails.
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 trying to get work done. Deploying Data Center in a clustered environment provides better support and the capacity to scale across multiple nodes. It gives 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 organisation.
While speed and performance are critical, organisations 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 business loss, 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. It means uninterrupted access for your users.
Maintaining control over customisations and operations management
Many enterprises operate highly customised application environments that cannot easily be migrated and operated via cloud services. Some organisations 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. They will 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 organisation grows and adds more users, scaling with Atlassian Data Center is quick and easy. They can add nodes to clusters without any downtime. It allows them to easily scale products, getting them in the hands of the people and teams that need them.
There are a lot of different paths for enterprises to go down. The Atlassian Data Center certainly helps organisations quickly scale, maintain an agile environment, and ensure productivity and maximum uptime. Big savings in time and improvements to productivity are important for every business. But at the enterprise level, they are even more essential. Productivity boosts can grow exponentially and give the business an important competitive advantage which is critical in the current environment.
As an Enterprise-Certified Atlassian Platinum Solution Partner, Clearvision is well placed to provide large enterprises and the public sector with consultancy, technical implementation, hosting, training, licensing and support services for the Atlassian stack, as well as vetted contractors via its sister company, ClearHub. Clearvision has also established partnerships with a number of leading technology vendors that bring added value to its customer base, namely AWS, Checkmarx and Mendix, amongst others.
