Jaclyn Mazzarella posted on Sep 09, 2020
Atlassian products have been seeing tremendous popularity and widespread adoption, amongst companies of all sizes over the past few years. Although most organizations begin their Atlassian journey with server products, as their user base increases, the limited resiliency and disaster recovery capabilities of Atlassian Server make it challenging to keep up with scalability and availability requirements. When organizations reach this “tipping point”, they need to decide whether or not to move to Atlassian Data Center.
Atlassian Data Center can help organizations make the most of high availability and improved failover capabilities to ensure mission-critical applications continue to perform as intended while minimizing the potential impact of downtime.
Moving to Atlassian Data Center is important, but so is considering the costs of migration
Atlassian Data Center delivers the required level of high availability, and performance organizations need to handle the growth of their business. Since it uses active-active clustering, it ensures that if one server in the cluster goes down, traffic is automatically redirected to an active server – without hampering business operations. In addition to this, Atlassian Data Center delivers unmatched compliance capabilities, multi-node environment options, disaster recovery options, security features, and more – empowering organizations to enjoy decent levels of flexibility, availability, and security.
Given the slew of features that Atlassian Data Center offers, it is natural for organizations to migrate their Server instances. While the capabilities are extremely appealing, it is important to also consider the costs of Sever to Data Center migration. An in-depth understanding of costs can allow organizations to have a birds-eye view of the investments they will need and can also help them stay in the know of how to best leverage Data Center features – without unnecessary expenditure.
When should you consider upgrading to Data Center?
To determine whether Data Center is the right fit for you, we’ve outlined some criteria to help in the decision-making process. There is also an excellent blog from Atlassian that explains more about the process.
Users
How many users access your Atlassian applications each day? Is this number growing? This is very important to think about.
We’ve found that Jira Software, Confluence, and Bitbucket customers typically need more stability when their user base reaches 500 – 1,000. 45% of current Data Center customers have upgraded to this offering at the 500 or 1,000 user tier. For Jira Service Desk, we found that 50% of Data Center customers upgrade when they reach 50 agents. Your team’s growth rate should also be taken into consideration.
Performance
As you scale, are you getting the same level of performance? For larger customers, performance degradation usually happens under high load or peak times. This is even more common for organizations where teams in multiple geographic locations work online at the same time. Sometimes, performance degradation occurs simply because of the amount of data that has accumulated in the application. And sometimes running jobs, like API calls or queries, are the culprits. Consider implementing monitoring or other ways to measure performance to stay one step ahead.
Downtime
For many organizations, a single hour of downtime can cost thousands of dollars. When deciding whether to upgrade to Data Center, consider whether your organization can afford downtime.
There are typically two primary causes of downtime:
- Application issues are often caused by JVM errors. Most commonly, this type of failure occurs when memory dedicated to the server for running the application gets too full, or when the database’s connection is overloaded by requests.
- Server disruption or crashes can be caused by a variety of things, including planned maintenance, unplanned upgrades or installations, or resources such as CPU, RAM, or storage on the server being overwhelmed. Any type of outage results in lost productivity from your employees being unable to work, so it’s important to consider how many of your employees rely on Atlassian products to get their jobs done and what that downtime may cost you.
Data Center not only allows you to enable clustering for high availability to limit these types of disruptions, but it also has additional tools like read-only mode, zero downtime upgrades, and rate-limiting to further strengthen the stability and reliability of your Atlassian product(s).
Administration
You may be using a federated environment or optimizing your single server to meet your needs, but the complexity and time required to do either of these can be quite taxing. Atlassian Data Center offers administrative features that make the lives of admins easier. Maybe you want to reduce administrative time spent on upgrades or unlock some of the automation capabilities available using our support for AWS or Azure Quickstarts. Maybe you want to reduce the time you spend adjusting your server environment to improve performance and instead archive issues or projects in just a few clicks for similar performance improvements. Or maybe you are managing multiple server instances and want to consolidate onto a single Data Center instance to centralize and simplify the duties of your admin team.
Security & Compliance
As organizations mature, security and compliance requirements become increasingly complex. Whether it’s more secure authentication protocols or advanced auditing to comply with internal policies, we’ve got you covered. We are continuing to invest in new ways to provide enterprise organizations with security, compliance, and governance capabilities.
