Hosting & Colocation
the business case. More importantly the market now understands the value proposition of carrier-neutral colocation, and as the sector continues to build its critical mass and attracts more communities of interest, the more value we offer to current and future customers.
Again, according to the IDC study, many factors are contributing to the growth of colocation – the increase of digital content (such as IPTV and music), as well as the growth of high- bandwidth consumer and business Internet-based applications, specifically social networking, public and private cloud computing and Software as a Service.
Other factors contributing to this growth include the cost/benefit-driven movement of enterprises to carrier- neutral colocation rather than in- house data centre enhancement.
The cost side of the analysis is being greatly affected by the need for power and cooling density to enable virtualization and the ready availability of appropriately skilled personnel in outsourced data centres.
The research also highlighted a strong correlation between the main challenges of managing in-house data centres and the main perceived benefits of colocation. The key challenges (as defined by 25 – 40% of respondents) are flexibility, security, managing operating costs, external connectivity issues, and securing Capex.
The key perceived benefits of colocation (as defined by 25-40% of respondents) include better resilience, scalability and flexibility, better security, and greater cost- effectiveness.
Personnel issues also correlate quite closely: 20% of respondents regarded hiring and retaining skilled staff as a key challenge, and 24% believe that data centre operators have better skills.
DCS: How are the following impacting on your business?
GM: Virtualisation Virtualisation is good for our business. Interxion has worked with many organisations that have implemented data centre virtualisation projects, the net result of which is high-power- density deployments and increased utilisation of servers.
These servers, when deployed in high density configurations, generate more heat, requiring increased levels of cooling and operational expertise to manage. Many legacy data centres are not equipped to meet these requirements, so organisations look to companies like Interxion to ensure availability of their virtualised environments.
In addition, virtualised servers often require a smaller footprint, so we are able to fit more customers into our data centres which increases our yields while building the member density of our communities of interest.
The Cloud The provision of services ever more efficiently, cheaply and reliably is a fantastic opportunity that is still growing in ways we can’t even predict. We do know customers need to be close to their markets and, therefore, low-latency infrastructure is key, otherwise services are rendered ineffective.
Interxion’s sites don’t just offer a robust infrastructure, but more
16 | DATA CENTRE SOLUTIONS |
www.datacentresols.com
importantly they operate as true cloud hubs, providing seamless power, space and in-house access to all relevant network service providers optimising the performance of cloud- based content and applications to end users. Our market strategy, which is in line with our data centre design strategy, is to be “where the cloud lives”.
Power availability/energy efficiency Power is critical, the rising cost as well as the impact of using too much of it with regards to its environmental cost is becoming more severe and will be penalised through the UK Carbon Reduction Commitment implementation.
We continue to see increased power requirements from customers across our 28 data centres in 11 countries across Europe. Like Interxion, all of them are motivated to put provisions in place to continue to improve power usage efficiencies in order to stay on top of this issue.
All Interxion sites are designed using Interxion’s energy-efficient modular architecture with free cooling and maximum-efficiency components as standard. Power monitoring and management systems also enable users to monitor their power usage, streamlining their operations to optimise Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE).
DCS: How do you characterise Interxion’s DC portfolio from this perspective and how do you ensure they can meet current and future customer requirements?
GM: Using our modular build process, we build out areas of space that allow the use of the latest technologies as they become
February/March 2011
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