Keeping up with technology

In 1965, when Gordon Moore predicted (in effect) that the cost of computing power would halve every 18 months, few people realized that eventually the cost of the infrastructure to support processors would exceed the cost of the processors themselves. Today, the density of processing power is rising dramatically, which means that data centers are continuously evolving their infrastructure to cope with rising power and cooling demands. While data centers have resident experts to meet these challenges head-on, most enterprises don’t.

Networks have undergone upgrades from fast Ethernet to Gigabit Ethernet, and CAT5 to CAT5e and then to CAT6, all in the space of three years. If this isn’t enough, pretty soon we’re going to see Augmented CAT6 (10 Gigabit) networks being implemented as standard.

On the server front, blade servers are finally coming into their own, but implementing blade servers properly to achieve near-100 percent uptime is far from child’s play. Again, it’s the data centers that have the technical muscle to be able to do this for their customers as a matter of routine.

Most of our customers tell us that one of the biggest drivers for their outsourcing initiatives is not access to technology but to people. Managing intrinsic voice and data platforms demands the right people in place to deliver high availability, security and performance. There’s no margin for error, which means that you need to have an in-house brain-trust that is capable of keeping things up and running on a 24x7 basis while also keeping an eye on available technology upgrades to make sure you don’t concede a technological edge to your competitors.

What this comes down to is that the cost of having to constantly upgrade network technology, infrastructure and skill-sets is simply far too high for the average enterprise to swallow. This is one of the prime reasons why, over the last three years, enterprises around the world have realized that they’re far better off outsourcing hosting infrastructure to data center service providers.

Service game

One of the most cited reasons for the extinction of dinosaurs was that they were too big and ponderous to be able to rapidly adapt to a cataclysmic event, while smaller and more nimble creatures were able to adapt to their new environment and continue evolving.

The parallel here is painfully obvious: the data centers that have been through the cataclysmic dotcom crash and are still alive and kicking are the ones that have adapted their business methodologies and core market
offerings. The take-it-or-leave-it all-or-nothing offerings of earlier days have been replaced by a more customer-friendly à-la-carte approach where customers can now pick and choose what they want from a wide range of services aimed at enhancing availability, performance and security.

Data centers which have done this successfully now position themselves as managed service providers, a name which implies that the physical data center is simply a delivery mechanism for providing customers with new market offerings such as SaaS (software as a service) or on-demand grid computing (whereby customers can get on-demand computing power for only as long as they need it).

Through such value-added services that rise above basic server co-location and bandwidth, smart data centers have managed to keep customers coming back for more.

The ride continues

In a recent study, the Datacenter Users Group, a worldwide group of influential data center managers, found that all current data center facilities in the world are expected to reach maximum capacity before 2011. That’s less than four years away. Demand currently exceeds supply, which led service provider Telecity RedBus to increase hosting fees by more than 60 percent last year, with an indication that they could do so again in the near future-yet their data centers continue to run at near-full capacity.

Does this mean a rosy outlook for these technological powerhouses?
Yes and no.

Data centers today face serious challenges in the areas of power and cooling. Server density has become so high that data centers are becoming the largest consumers of power in a world that is doing all it can to reduce power consumption as much as possible. IT industry analysts expect global server sales to double between 2007 and 2009, which means there is going to be even greater demand for quality hosting space.

At the end of the day, the growing demand for quality hosting and managed services-market-corrections notwithstanding-is fueling data center innovation and growth. As the cost-basis and market demands continue to shift, it’s those data centers which progressively evolve their infrastructure and service offerings that will continue to flourish.