FOCUS COLOCATION
Issue 17, August/September
COLOCATION EVOLUTION
Savvis Hosting and Cloud Business Unit General Manager Brian Klingbeil details the changing market
olocation is often the forgotten sibling in the managed IT services family. Looking in from outside the industry, you may be forgiven for thinking that cloud computing can replace colocation services. The truth is that over the past few years we have seen rising enterprise demand for colocation, whether it is part of a complete infrastructure outsourcing plan or a point solution to aid compliance such as PCI, or to fix an issue involving integrating legacy equipment and new services.
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There is a demand for colocation to help deliver greater efficiency. Colocating is almost always more efficient in terms of energy and cooling costs than having equipment in server rooms within organizations. There are other strong drivers for increased colocation uptake, especially when a provider has the scale to offer a choice of data centers. For instance, the need to minimize latency between certain applications and their markets drives regional colocation, increasing data protection scrutiny. This is the case for businesses inside the EU, which requires data to be located in particular jurisdictions. It also has business continuity and disaster recovery demands that require data to reside somewhere where other copies of data are not.
IT DIRECTORS MOVING UP THE CHAIN
CIOs and IT directors, especially in Europe, have become more involved in the corporate decision making process and are tightly aligning IT budgets to deliver directly against business need. They are increasingly eager to question and evaluate existing methods so excessive fat can be trimmed from budgets, ensuring businesses stay lean and scalable.
CIOs have become savvier, scrutinizing service level agreements (SLAs), and are eager to understand the intricacies of data centers and how facilities are managed. As a result, they are investing more time and resources evaluating data center options.
IT directors are also exploring colocation options, asking why they require so much data center space. Having only several racks of
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space blocked out and provisioned with power and cooling can effectively waste thousands of square feet inside a data center.
Colocation pricing models vary around the world. In some markets this space is contractually reserved – but not charged for – until it is used. In others, all the space where power and cooling is provisioned is paid for.
With the political and financial pressure on, the option to block space for free is being removed, especially in top-performing data centers, where space is at a premium.
This, combined with the close focus of IT directors, is causing a shift in the way colocation
is used. Instead of deploying
colocation in the old-fashioned caged-kit way, IT directors are looking to make colocation more flexible by dipping into other services offered by IT infrastructure vendors.
An example of this approach can be seen with IT directors buying capacity by the gigabyte from their host on demand instead of incurring capital expense and delaying the procuring and installing of a new storage array in caged space when capacity is required. This offers multiple benefits, including near-instant deployment, no capital expenditure and depreciation, and provides the ability to scale the available storage up or down to meet demand.
THE EVOLUTION OF COLOCATION
Once this approach has been successfully sampled, it is common to see companies start to change their mentality around colocation as they move through the different points of their lifecycle. As they grow, the overhead of
managing increasing colocation equipment
rises in parallel with the complexity and size of their business. This leads to a move to managed services or the Cloud because they realize it is a better use of resources, leveraging expertise of the service provider’s technology specialists. This frees them to deliver and migrate apps and features rather than maintain IT infrastructure.
Such a scenario has led to an increase in demand for service providers offering a full portfolio of services – from colocation to managed hosting to public, private and hybrid cloud. Developing the facilities and the capability to integrate this full range of technologies has been a major challenge for many colocation providers.
Running a data center is like attempting to keep a car on the road 24 hours a day, 365 days a year without stopping – yet driving as efficiently as possible. Even if you started with the best equipment in the world, planning and implementing the necessary rolling maintenance is
critical if single evolution of technology is points
failure and outages are to be avoided. The
of helping,
bringing cheaper uninterrupted power supplies, generator and cooling technologies together with planning, automation and monitoring tools. But still one of the most valuable assets in colocation continues to be experience.
CLOUD CONTROL
The desire for fine-tuned control over systems has been one of the primary needs colocation has satisfied. For most clients, a sufficient level of control is currently available in the cloud, which eliminates the burden of configuring and maintaining equipment. Therefore, to maintain relevance in future, providers need to evolve and become a bridge to a wider range of managed services.
This approach will provide a base for effectively connecting an organization’s unique IT configurations and IP costs to the wider range of services required to support that technology. The parallel provision of colocation as host for, and part of, the full spectrum of cloud options is where the future lies for the industry.
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