D ATA CENTRES
Beating the capacity crunch using colocation The colocated future is bright by Bryn Jones, Sales Director with CommScope
With organisations continuing to tighten budgets, the last decade has seen an increasing shift towards outsourcing in a bid to improve cost efficiencies. As part of this trend, businesses have
outsourced a number of crucial business functions including IT equipment, staff and infrastructure. With regards to the latter issue,
Bryan Jones reveals how CoLo can smooth over data demand variances...
organisations have been moving away from a tendency to build and manage their own data centres, and instead are opting for hosted or colocated (CoLo) facilities. Recent research from Cisco found
that global IP traffic will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23% from 2012 to 2017. This growth is also being reflected in Enterprise networks, giving rise to similar increases in server and storage area network infrastructure. The capacity crunch has driven up
data centre costs for enterprises as they race to keep up with demand by adding capacity through upgrades or the construction of new data centres. Most CIOs are questioning whether
to build bigger in-house data centres or outsource to a CoLo facility - and increasingly the latter is proving to be the more cost effective solution.
Lowering expenditure Colocated data centres allow multiple enterprises to locate their network, server and storage solutions on the same external, third party premises. This is rapidly gaining popularity as enterprises look to tackle the capacity crunch and benefit from increased flexibility and cost savings. Recent research from Gartner
predicts that spending on data centres is set to swell to $147 billion this year, a 4.5% increase on 2012’s total of $141 billion. The increase in spend is being driven
by the need for faster processing, greater bandwidth and huge storage capacities. To put this rapid pace of change into perspective, most hardware systems will be obsolete around five years after deployment. This potentially unpredictable
demand for servers and storage is another factor driving CIOs down the CoLo route. Adding resources within a CoLo
facility is considerably easier than adding a new data centre room in an already overcrowded building. Colocation can offer substantial
savings to both capital and operational expenditure (Capex and Opex). By
hosting equipment with a third-party, enterprises do not need to shoulder the full cost of building and outfitting a new data centre. As a consequence of these economies
of scale, CoLo facilities generally prove to be more efficient, providing CIOs with an opportunity to realise substantial savings to their on-going Opex - a boon given rising power costs worldwide. Moreover, CoLo providers can
support the enormous costs of designing and building such bespoke facilities because of the economies of scale offered by housing multiple enterprise customers, supported by common infrastructure. CoLo facilities can be the best fit for
maintaining control of IT equipment while letting the provider focus on data centre integrity, security and uptime. CoLo providers, meanwhile, can
offer a broad spectrum of benefits that an individual enterprise would find difficult to match in-house, such as lower latencies, dedicated servers and design and build services. By their very nature, CoLo data
centres are designed to be extremely scalable. This means that hosted data centres
can execute changes extremely rapidly - minimising or entirely negating any downtime for their enterprise customers.
The future of colocation The demand for colocated or hosted solutions is already outstripping the supply available in the marketplace. This is particularly true in Europe
and specifically in locations with high levels of connectivity including financial centres like London, Amsterdam and Frankfurt. Whilst laying the groundwork to meet
future needs may seem a daunting task now, prudent planning for the long term will prove a sensible investment, and the CoLo option will have to be part of the decision process. It will not suit everybody but it will
prove the most cost effective option for a growing number of CIOs.
www.commscope.com CoLocation: more server racks required 14 NETCOMMS europe Volume IV Issue 1 2013
www.netcommseurope.com
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