COLOCATION
centre and as the reach of virtualisation extends from servers to storage, network and security, that ratio is bound to increase. Even in the past year, the density of virtual servers has continued to increase. These days it is entirely possible to host a single blade chassis with 4TB of RAM and one hundred and sixty high performance cores. That equates to as many as fi ve hundred production grade virtual servers in a single blade chassis. The introduction of virtualisation
opens up a huge range of new services and opportunities. MSPs are reserving physical data centre space to build large powerful virtual data centres. As well as making additional physical colocation available to organisations, virtual data centre space becomes an option. Virtual environments often have much higher inherent resilience where service can migrate seamlessly between physical hardware requiring no human intervention. The most progressive
service providers have extended the concept to provide virtual data centres that literally span multiple physical sites. In this type of solution, a virtual server can be migrated between locations in real time with no loss of service for the end users accessing that system. High levels of resilience are now available to mid-tier organisations, not just affl uent enterprise customers. MSPs are extending the ‘pay as you go’ and cloud centric commercial model into the data centre itself. Infrastructure is available as a service (IaaS), charged on the quantities consumed. The virtual infrastructure available extends the full extent of the stack from servers, storage and network as well as beyond to the security layer. Models now exist that allow customers to operate hybrid environments of virtual systems blended with physically hosted infrastructure, where the service provider delivers the data centre LAN to make that possible and can manage and monitor the
entire stack. The availability of hybrid models allows for very rapid expansion of capability to handle end-of-year or seasonal peaks as an example. Once the peak has passed, the infrastructure is released back into the pool and charges cease. Vast physical estates of barely used infrastructure are beginning to disappear. The beauty of this model is that the opportunity to fl ex demand is contained within the data centre and does not expose infrastructure to the security and compliance issues inherent in public cloud offerings. To enable compliance options, many
MSPs will have invested in the quality systems and security compliance to achieve ISO 9001 and ISO 27001. Some are investing in the additional services and infrastructure required to provide PCI compliance within a virtual data centre. Moving up the software stack, MSPs
are able to deliver a huge range of software as a service (SaaS) options. The range of services is breath-taking – from messaging and collaboration to backup to business process integration, software services operate on the now familiar pay as you use model with very low levels of minimum commitment. Invariably they will operate from the same resilient infrastructure used to deliver the virtual data centres and will operate at high levels of availability. Other SaaS providers will also be able
to make use of virtual infrastructure and make their own unique offering available to other tenants of the data centre. In a very short space of time, the data centre has been transformed in to a thriving ecosystem with multiple tenants cross-selling services to each other, underpinned by the high resilience and performance people have come to expect. Effective MSPs are helping to encourage that marketplace because it creates further opportunity. The modern data centre is an
exciting, vibrant place. It has lost none of its resilience or power and has become dramatically denser, with an emerging range of business- transforming services ready to be consumed by its customers.
The density of virtual servers has continue to increase in the past year. 44 NETCOMMS europe Volume II Issue 3 2012
www.netcommseurope.com
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