IO and Gartner discuss the benefits of outsourcing the data center and the trend towards procuring the data center as a service.
Ted Chamberlin, Research VP at Gartner and Kevin Malik, IO CIO, discuss the following:
What are the macroeconomic factors influencing the outsourcing of the data center?
- Economy: IT budgets are exhibiting flat or minimal growth
- Technology Advancements: Increasing server density, server virtualization, and rising power consumption rates lead to a demand for more scalable platforms to manage applications in a 24/7 environment.
- Hyper-convergence: Scalability necessary as voice, video, and application data all being converged.
- Regulatory Compliance: Looming data center regulations similar to EU code of conduct
What are the IT/Business specific factors influencing the outsourcing of the data center?
- Availability of space and power
- Availability of carrier network connections
- Efficient use of capital
- Use of internal resources
What is the true "useful life" of a data center in today's ever-changing technology world? How does this compare to servers, storage arrays and networking equipment?
The outer shell of the building could last 50 to 100 years and the critical systems inside the data center such as heating, ventilation, AC/cooling, servers, storage, switching fabric, etc., have a useful life of 4-7 years
What are the economic and organizational benefits of outsourcing the data center?
- Potential for lower costs: If an enterprise has fluctuating needs for data center space or capacity (holiday rush, batch processing, etc.), outsourcing outweighs cost of having ability to do it internally.
- Focus on core competencies: If it's not designing/developing data center, should leave it to the experts and focus on what's driving revenue
- Enhanced reliability: Most applications need to be available 24/7/Forever. To have that availability a reliable data center service provider is necessary
What are some current trends in data center design and engineering?
Modular data centers: Provide faster time to marketer, lower operating costs, and greater flexibility to deploy anywhere data center capacity is needed.
Why outsource your data center?
- Difficult to expand: May require deceleration of application deployment, requires significant capital, and may be a multiyear process.
- Difficult to get staff up to speed: Requires highly skilled labor to maintain and run the data center which isn't something most companies want to focus on.
For more information or to speak with IO, please call 866.683.6095 or email info@iodatacenters.com
