Once upon a time, datacentres were back-office domains
controlled by a company’s in-house IT specialists; today, a new
approach to server-room management is emerging to meet the
computing and communications needs of modern
organisations.
These new
datacentres are very different to their predecessors, and even look
physically distinct. Today’s datacentres are not merely larger in
terms of space; they have far greater capacity in every respect.
Most organisations today are underpinned by mission-critical
technology, and have a far greater appetite for computing power and
network bandwidth than could be foreseen when the first-generation
spaces were built.
Power and heat
Today,
datacentres are built to handle the unique challenges posed by the
IT needs of modern organisations. Vast quantities of electricity
must be reliably supplied, while the concentrated heat generated by
racks of high-performance processors must be safely dissipated.
While
first-generation datacentres relied on ample free space to cool
monolithic mainframe computers, today’s datacentres pack in tens,
hundreds or even thousands of ultra-thin servers, terabytes of disk
storage, and dense equipment to provide fast communications. The
resulting power draw and heat has become a major concern, as
soaring energy prices have become a hugely significant cost-factor
in IT and facility-management budgets.
Low-cost connectivity
Another
recent change is that whereas the first datacentres were built to
serve a single company, the trend today is to move away from
internal consumption of resources and towards leveraging shared
infrastructures – driving down costs whilst enhancing operational
efficiency.
In part,
this last trend can be seen as directly related to the increasing
market penetration of broadband and its impact on the way business
and individuals use computers. Organisations are increasingly
relying upon third-party ‘multi-sourced’ partners to deliver the
highly resilient and scalable IT infrastructure needed to provide
and maintain connectivity.
This has
led to the evolution of carrier-independent datacentres, firms that
offer a range of connectivity providers in order to improve network
resilience, drive down the cost of bandwidth, and deliver the
benefits of a shared infrastructure model.
It is not
only internet giants with large bandwidth requirements that have
cottoned on to the idea that shared spaces from a
carrier-independent datacentre can be an efficient way to handle
the needs of computing users. In the last five to eight years,
increasing numbers of corporate organisations have begun to use
carrier-independent datacentres to supplement (or even replace)
their old in-house datacentres.
The benefits of carrier-independence
Carrier-independent datacentres offer many compelling arguments for
outsourcing your IT or communications infrastructure. As one
example, if your company has its own datacentre, it will need to
contract to a carrier – which means paying for the physical and
exclusive cabling between your datacentre and their exchange. Worse
still,
if
the provider’s systems crash, you lose connectivity. And
contracting to a second carrier provider for resilience purposes is
usually too costly for most organisations.
By contrast, outsourced service providers can offer hosting with
multiple carriers, so you are no longer tied to a single supplier
or a single physical infrastructure. If one carrier’s system goes
down, you can automatically switch to another – promoting
resilience and ensuring availability.
Equally, if you choose an outsourced datacentre with a large number
of different carriers – Interxion houses around 700, with between
50 and 100 in each datacentre – they will have to compete for your
business. The cost savings can be significant; in some cases,
enough to pay for your first year’s hosting.
Service evolution
Third-party datacentre hosts are now offering a wide range of
services to customers. Very often, they act as a safety net in
companies’ disaster recovery policies, ensuring that data is
mirrored offsite so that even in the event of a massive operational
failure, key data can be accessed and restored.
Security
is another area that hosting companies are starting to move into.
Firewalls, anti-spam services and virus protection are often
provided by datacentres as they scan for attacks or potential
malicious code.
The number
and range of mission-critical applications being managed by
third-party datacentres has also increased. From sales force
automation and customer relationship management applications to
supply-chain management and human resources software, almost every
kind of modern application can now be found housed and supported by
third-party datacentres.
The
emergence of the third-party datacentre is also playing its part in
another trend, as companies come under pressure to show their
environmental credentials. By sharing resources and increasing the
utilisation of hardware, datacentres enable power consumption to be
minimised. Arguably, this overall approach is “greener” than the
traditional model, where servers often run at just 20 percent
capacity and energy-hungry cooling equipment struggles to dissipate
heat from poorly-designed server rooms.
Taking IT off your
hands
Yet the
most common reason for the shift towards third-party datacentres is
probably still the ability to dispense with the burden of IT
administration. At a time when security patching and updating of
applications has reached epidemic proportions, many companies will
be more than happy to see the back of troublesome administrative
duties that do nothing to improve underlying business performance
or to help them differentiate themselves from competitors.
Companies
that have experimented with total outsourcing can find in
third-party datacentres a halfway-house approach: data can be
stored in the same country and direct access to equipment can often
be provided. The model also provides an escape route from having to
deal with challenges such as overheating equipment, spiralling data
storage volumes or the complexities of regulatory change and its
impact on data movement and storage.
At least
in the short term, many companies will choose to continue investing
in internal staff and equipment to manage IT tasks. Yet there is a
clear trend towards passing the load on to specialists – who have
greater expertise and can take advantage of economies of scale to
deliver a better service in order to maintain their leadership
position.