Managing data centers is increasingly complex and costly for organisations, with challenges in controlling expenses, scaling infrastructure, reducing complexity, securing data, and maintaining reliability — in fact, 44% of organisations have faced significant outages in the past three years.
Salesforce has addressed these multifaceted challenges with Hyperforce, a next-generation public cloud architecture that is designed to optimise operational efficiency for Salesforce Data Cloud customers. With Hyperforce, Data Cloud enables businesses to scale resources cost-effectively, ensure data is protected with advanced security measures, manage complex data sets with ease, and much more. Consequently, organisations will focus more on growth and less on infrastructure management, competing for expensive top technology-specific IT talent, and less on developing custom bespoke applications. It is an ideal solution for businesses looking to expand their capabilities in handling large volumes of data and complex data jobs efficiently.
Increasing scalability, reducing latency
Hyperforce enables Data Cloud customers to adapt swiftly to changing demands. By utilising elastic horizontal scaling, services can expand or contract their capacity based on real-time demand. This means that during peak times, additional resources are automatically allocated to handle increased traffic, and during quieter periods, these resources are reduced, optimising costs and efficiency.
One of the ways Hyperforce does this is with Kubernetes. Load balancers can distribute load across fleets of machines within at least three regional data center availability zones (AZs) — optimally located to manage traffic workloads efficiently. This method of scaling is more advantageous than traditional vertical scaling, which is limited by the physical capacities of a single machine. This approach also ensures that there will always be sufficient capacity to grow, as needed, without the risk of overloading.
Scaling has significantly enhanced the efficiency and performance of Data Cloud services, especially during high-traffic periods like Black Friday. Previously, companies had to undergo extensive preparation, with long lead times as they installed additional hardware and software to accommodate anticipated peak demand. This process was not only resource-intensive but also based on predictions, which might not always be accurate, leading to underutilisation or overload of resources.
AZs also localise compute and data storage in data centers near the user. This enhances Data Cloud’s performance by reducing latency as data can be accessed more quickly and efficiently without the disruptions caused by distance, significantly boosting data accessibility and usability.
Boosting security
Hyperforce enhances Data Cloud security by adding several layers of protection to store and handle data more safely, including:
- Security Isolation: Think of this as having your own secure storage room within a large warehouse. Each customer’s data is kept separate, ensuring that only authorised users can access their own information.
- Encryption: This is like locking your data in a safe. Whether the data is just sitting there (at rest) or being sent somewhere (in transit), it’s nearly impossible to access (or steal) without the right encryption keys.
- Zero Trust Model: Imagine the most secure building ever, where neither humans nor machines can enter — not even the CEOs — without undergoing stringent security screenings identical for all. Similarly, every request within Hyperforce is thoroughly checked to make sure it’s allowed, ensuring no unauthorised access and only at the time it is required.
By using these methods, Hyperforce significantly boosts the security of Data Cloud, making it a highly secure platform for businesses to manage and store their data. This is crucial for maintaining trust and ensuring that sensitive information is protected against threats.
By using these methods, Hyperforce significantly boosts the security of Data Cloud, making it a highly secure platform for businesses to manage and store their data. This is crucial for maintaining trust and ensuring that sensitive information is protected against threats.
Jim Ostrognai, Senior Vice President, Software Engineering
Enhancing reliability
The integration of Hyperforce with Data Cloud has notably improved the overall reliability and uptime of Data Cloud services. This enhancement is primarily due to Hyperforce’s architecture, which features at least three independent data centers across AZs. This configuration ensures that if one of the three data centers experiences an issue, the system can seamlessly continue operations using the other data centers, thereby maintaining service continuity and minimising downtime.
Additionally, the integration has allowed Data Cloud to offer a higher Service Level Agreement of 99.95% uptime to its customers, compared to the previous cap of 99.9% with first-party data center solutions. While a seemingly inconsequential statistical difference, this slight increase in reliability is actually crucial for businesses that rely on constant data availability and swift service responses.
Speeding regional availability
Hyperforce speeds up and reduces the cost of Data Cloud deployments across different global regions while also improving availability. Previously, launching Data Cloud in a new region could occasionally be delayed due to the extensive processes involved, such as securing data centers, negotiating contracts, and building infrastructure from scratch. Hyperforce streamlines such processes by piggybacking on the infrastructure of public cloud providers, enabling Salesforce to quickly establish Data Cloud in any region. This helps reduce the time and expense involved in geographic expansion, allowing Data Cloud to swiftly address business needs in new markets.
Managing complex data sets
The integration of Data Cloud and Hyperforce simplifies the management of complex data sets and gives users indirect access to the latest Big Data tools like Apache Spark, Trino, Presto, NoSql, blob storage, caching, and relational databases to run large-scale data jobs tailored for very specific use cases. Hyperforce serves as a secure platform where these tools are utilised without the users needing to be burdened with the operational overhead or expertise to precisely tune the technology or worry about the underlying infrastructure costs and maintenance.
Integrating Data Cloud and Hyperforce also makes handling vast amounts of unstructured data possible. Data Cloud can employ the latest unstructured database technologies within Hyperforce to manage diverse data types and large volumes of data. This, in turn, aids in better data unification, data grounding, analysis, and the generation of actionable insights for businesses.
Hyperforce not only simplifies the complexities of data management but also empowers businesses to thrive in a data-driven world. By enhancing scalability, boosting security, and ensuring high reliability, Hyperforce transforms the way organisations handle data, allowing them to focus on innovation and growth rather than infrastructure. With these capabilities, Data Cloud users are well-equipped to meet the demands of today’s dynamic market environments, making Hyperforce a pivotal solution in the landscape of data management.
More information:
- Dive deeper on Data Cloud
- Read the news that Salesforce is launching Data Cloud on Hyperforce in the UK
- Tune in to World Tour London on Salesforce+ and read more World Tour London news here
- Learn more about Hyperforce in this article
