Server and Data Center - What's right for you
The difference between our self-managed versions and why Data Center is an excellent choice for businesses.
While the world seems to be undergoing a SaaS revolution, some businesses still want or need the control that self-managed versions provide. If you're not yet ready for our cloud products—and still seeking more control over your data and infrastructure—then Data Center is the best choice. Atlassian's Data Center products offer the same functionalities you're familiar with from our Server products but come with additional features and capabilities to better serve enterprises.
What’s the Difference Between Server and Data Center?
| Scale, Performance, and Availability |
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|---|---|
| Infrastructure and Operations |
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| Compliance, Governance, and Security |
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| User Management |
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Simply put, Data Center is built for enterprises. High performance, scalability, seamless user management, flexible deployment options, and robust security are just a few ways Data Center meets the needs of large-scale organizations.
Why Upgrade from Server to Data Center?
What do all these added Data Center features mean for your organization, and when should you consider upgrading from Server? We've narrowed it down to three main benefits.
Deliver Fast, Reliable, and Scalable Products
As a business, you’re dealing with large, complex, growing, and/or geographically dispersed teams. If these teams rely on Atlassian products to get their work done, any performance or availability issues could lead to a significant productivity loss. If you're unsure whether you need higher speed, reliability, or scalability in your Atlassian products, consider the following questions:
Are your users experiencing delays?
One of the biggest culprits of performance issues is concurrent usage. Under high loads or during peak times, your product performance may drop, which can be frustrating for the teams you're supporting as they try to get their work done. With the ability to deploy Data Center in a clustered environment, you can better support your company’s scale across multiple nodes, providing faster, smoother experiences for your teams.
Additionally, we offer features in our Data Center products to help enhance performance. Both Jira Software and Jira Service Desk allow for project and issue archiving to clean up your instance, create space, and make your products more scalable.
Speed can also be an issue for employees who are physically far from your servers. To help better serve geographically dispersed teams, we provide support with content delivery networks (CDNs) in Jira Software, Jira Service Desk, and Confluence, and with smart mirroring and mirror farms in Bitbucket. These features enable you to speed up the experience for your distributed users so they aren’t at a disadvantage due to their location.
Have you experienced any downtime?
While speed and performance are critical, you may see an even bigger hit in productivity if you experience any downtime. For users relying on Atlassian products to get their work done, even a few minutes of downtime can mean significant financial loss for a business. That's why ensuring the reliability and availability of your Atlassian products is crucial. With active clustering, a load balancer automatically redirects traffic from a failed node to an active one in the cluster, meaning uninterrupted access for your users. Additionally, product-specific features like zero downtime upgrades in Jira Software and Jira Service Managemet and read-only mode in Confluence allow for consistent access to your products, even during planned upgrades.
Are you adding (or planning to add) new users and teams to your Atlassian products?
Finally, if you're growing and adding more users to your Atlassian products, scaling Data Center is quick and easy. You can add nodes to your cluster without downtime to easily scale your products and deliver them to the teams and individuals who need them.
Stay Secure and Compliant
Are you looking for more user management capabilities beyond what’s already packaged in our Data Center products? Check out Crowd Data Center. Crowd simplifies user management for your Atlassian products, integrates with your existing identity infrastructure to create a seamless experience for your end users (as well as your own), and helps you closely track license consumption.
Today and in the future, security is essential for all businesses, but if you’re in a regulated industry, security and compliance are non-negotiable. While Data Center already provides features to help you maintain secure and compliant products, we continue to invest in new capabilities.
A big piece of your security puzzle is ensuring that the right people have access to your Atlassian products. SAML and OpenID Connect support help you meet your authentication standards and make provisioning new users seamless.
In addition to robust security, demonstrating compliance is critical for businesses in regulated industries. Data Center products make it easy to comply with ever-evolving regulations. Advanced auditing in Data Center provides a digital record of security-related activity that not only helps organizations enhance security but also proves compliance and improves visibility.
Leverage Infrastructure Flexibility
In addition to increased control, we know that businesses need more flexibility in their software. No organization is the same, and a one-size-fits-all solution won’t work for everyone. With this in mind, we offer infrastructure flexibility, leaving the decision of how to host your Data Center products up to you.
While you can deploy Data Center on your own hardware, you can also take advantage of the benefits of cloud computing by turning to IaaS vendors like AWS or Azure to deploy your Atlassian products. Doing so can save you time and money and make it even easier to scale Data Center as needed.
Learn More About Data Center
Atlassian's Data Center products offer all the features you’ll find in Server, but with more control over your data, more flexibility in your infrastructure, and more support for large or growing teams. In addition to these existing features, we continue to invest in and improve Data Center to meet the unique needs of large and complex organizations. For these reasons and more, Data Center is the perfect choice for enterprises.