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DebateTech: Datacenter the DHL way [full video]

When you’re delivering business services 24/7 to 430,000 staff across 226 countries you’ve got to have reliable, robust datacenter capabilities. DHL’s datacenter leaders explain how they do it.
Written by Angus Macaskill, Contributor

DHL delivers a whole range of services to its global clients: express, freight and forwarding, and contract logistics to service fast-moving businesses like airlines. Datacenter services from locations in Cyberjaya, Malaysia, and Prague in the Czech Republic are at the heart of delivering these services direct to DHL staff and customers.

Therefore, according to Yogananthan Sangarapillai Sivapathasundaram, head of IT Services in Cyberjaya & VP business relations for IT Services, APAC, the business needs datcenters that are “highly reliable and highly resilient”, with “very high uptimes.”

DHL treats IT as an internal service company. Internal business customers contract with IT for defined deliverables governed (and priced) by service level agreements (SLAs).

The DHL datacenters are primarily built on “a mix of physical, virtual [servers], and the start of the cloud” explains Bomi Pardiwalla, head of infrastructure services globally at DHL.  The business has begun a move to private cloud for software development and testing, and has its eye on hybrid cloud to enable busting to public cloud (IaaS) services when extra resources are required.

DHL doesn’t currently use converged/unified infrastructure components.  Its approach is to source components that comply with their IT architecture standards and build or configure the systems in-house.  Pardiwalla feels that gives DHL more flexibility and avoids potential extra costs that can arise from integrating technology that’s outside DHL’s architectural blueprint.

Looking ahead to 2020, Pardiwalla expects “99% virtualisation services”, plus hybrid cloud to supplement what’s been build in-house, and bursting to IaaS for rapid scalability.  He also dreams of improved power efficiency, and talks of the potential of solar energy to run datacenters as “a great thing to have."

To view highlights from this interview with DHL, click here.

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