Server vs. Data Center – what’s the difference?

At Atlassian, we understand the need for secure and compliant software. To address that need, we’re continually investing in these areas in our Atlassian-managed cloud products. But for those of you who have strict requirements or who are looking for a slower transition to cloud, Data Center is a great option. Although we’re accelerating our journey to the cloud at Atlassian by making some changes to our self-managed offerings, we’re continuing to provide and invest in our Data Center products. In fact, Atlassian’s Data Center products offer the same functionality you know and love in our Server products, but with even more features and capabilities to better serve enterprises.

If you aren’t yet ready for our cloud products, read on to learn about the added value in our Data Center products and the benefits of upgrading from Server to Data Center.

What’s the difference between Server and Data Center?

Simply put, Data Center is built for enterprises. High performance and availability, scalability, seamless user management, flexible deployment options, and solid security are just some of the ways in which Data Center meets the needs of organizations operating at scale.

And, as of February 2021, apps like Team Calendars for Confluence and Advanced Roadmaps for Jira that were once add-ons will now be included in our Data Center products.

To better understand the differences between Server and Data Center, take a look at our Data Center roadmap to learn about all the additional features that are currently available or coming soon.

The benefits of upgrading to Data Center

You may be wondering what all of these added Data Center features really mean for your organization. We’ve boiled it down to three main groups of benefits.

Deliver fast, reliable, and scalable products

As an enterprise, you’re probably dealing with large, complex, growing, and/or geographically distributed teams. And if those teams need Atlassian products to get their work done, any performance or availability issues can mean a huge loss in productivity. If you’re unsure whether you need greater speed, reliability, or scalability in your Atlassian products, consider the following questions:

Are your users experiencing delays?

One major culprit of performance issues is concurrent usage. Under high load or at peak times, your product performance is at risk of degrading, which can be frustrating for the teams you support who are trying to get work done. With the ability to deploy Data Center in a clustered environment, you can better support your company’s scale across multiple nodes, giving your teams a faster, more seamless experience.

Additionally, we offer features within our Data Center products themselves to help improve performance. In Jira Software and Jira Service Desk, you can archive both projects and issues to clear up space, clean up your instance, and make your products more performant.

Speed may also be an issue for employees who are physically distant from your servers. To help you better serve geographically distributed teams, we offer support for content delivery networks (CDNs) in Jira Software, Jira Service Desk, and Confluence, as well as smart mirroring & mirror farms in Bitbucket. These features allow you to accelerate the experience of your distributed users, so they’re not disadvantaged by their location.

Have you suffered from any downtime?

While speed and performance are critical, you may see an even bigger hit to productivity if you experience any downtime. For users who rely on Atlassian products to get work done, even a few minutes of downtime can represent a huge monetary loss for a business. That’s why ensuring the reliability and availability of your Atlassian products is crucial. With active clustering, the load balancer will automatically redirect traffic from a failed node to an active node in the cluster, meaning uninterrupted access for your users. Additionally, product-specific features like zero downtime upgrades in Jira Software and Jira Service Desk and read-only mode in Confluence ensure consistent access to the products, even when you’re going through planned upgrades.

Are you adding (or expecting to add) new users and teams to your Atlassian products?

Lastly, 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 any downtime in order to easily scale your products and get them in the hands of the people and teams that need them.

Stay secure and compliant

In this day and age, security is important for all businesses, but if you’re in an industry that’s subject to specific regulations, security and compliance are non-negotiable. While Data Center already offers features that will help you maintain secure and compliant products, we’re continuing to invest in new capabilities.

One big piece of your security puzzle is making sure that the right people – and only the right people – have access to your Atlassian products. Support for SAML and OpenID Connect help meet your authentication standards, and just-in-time provisioning makes authorizing new users seamless.

In addition to solid security, demonstrating compliance is critical for businesses in regulated industries. Our Data Center products make it as easy as possible for you to comply with and adapt to the ever-evolving regulatory landscape. Advanced auditing in Data Center provides a security-relevant digital record that not only helps organizations increase security, but also demonstrate compliance and improve visibility.

Take advantage of infrastructure flexibility

We understand that in addition to increased control, enterprises have a need for more flexibility in their software. Not every enterprise is the same, and no single solution can work for every organization. With that in mind, we offer infrastructure flexibility and leave it up to you to decide how to host your Data Center products.

While you can deploy Data Center on your own hardware, you can also take advantage of the benefits of cloud computing and turn to IaaS vendors like AWS or Azure to deploy your Atlassian products. In doing so, you can save time and money and make it even easier to scale Data Center as needed.

Learn more about Data Center

Atlassian’s Data Center products give you all the features you’d find in Server, but with more flexibility in your infrastructure and more support for large or growing teams. In addition to these existing features, we’re continuing to make investments and improvements in Data Center that meet the unique needs of large and complex organizations. For these reasons and more, Data Center is a great choice for enterprises.

To find out more about Data Center’s enterprise features and learn when and how to make the move to Data Center, check out our whitepaper. And if you’re interested in hearing from our customers about why they chose Data Center and what benefits they’ve realized, download our PDF.