Many companies are now re-evaluating how and where they choose to house mission-critical equipment. The challenge lies in finding the best balance in terms of physical resilience, locational convenience, flexibility, value for money, power and cooling capacity.

Diminishing Resources

Over time corporate data centres tend to run out of three principal resources: space, power and cooling capacity. Reaching the limit on any one of these will impede business growth and endanger IT resilience.

The use of new high-density servers has resulted in power and cooling demands rapidly outpacing forecasted expectations. Another of the DCI’s predictions is that over the next five years, power failures and limits on power availability will halt data centre operations at more than 90% of companies.

A recent survey by AFCOM (an international association of data centre professionals) found that a third of respondents expect to have to relocate their data centres in the next 10 years, while 45% expect to make major physical improvements to existing facilities. Of those predicting either relocation or improvement, a third cite “ageing facilities” and a third “new technologies” as driving their decisions.

Impractical and costly

The three main options for businesses looking to upgrade or relocate are:

• refitting and developing an existing environment – for example, an office-based data centre;
• buying land and building a new stand-alone data centre; or
• moving to specialist “IT space” within a purpose-built facility owned and operated by data centre experts such as Global Switch.

The first two options are highly capital-intensive, relatively unresponsive to change, and likely to be fraught with technical and planning difficulties. Office buildings are fundamentally unsuitable for the latest high density IT installations and can no longer offer the physical protection required to ensure IT continuity. Refitting an existing environment may also be risky, disruptive and further constrained by landlords’ restrictions and planning requirements. Office-based data centres will also always present residual risks due to their location and susceptibility to human error.

The second option – building a new stand-alone facility – offers greater resilience and will provide a purpose-designed high specification environment. But there are significant disadvantages associated with choosing this route, including: a shortage of suitable sites; prohibitively high capital costs; long lead times between the decision to build and actual relocation; difficulties associated with specifying future power and cooling needs; and limited scalability.

Future-proof resilience

The optimum solution is to relocate to a specialist data centre operated by a third party provider. Purpose-built and operated facilities benefit from economies of scale in the provision and purchasing of services, and can deliver a build-out far beyond that which could be
achieved in-house.

Moving critical IT infrastructure into purpose-designed IT space within a Global Switch data centre provides maximum physical resilience, as well as diverse and durable power and cooling capacity that is scalable to changing needs. Other potential benefits include:

• Simplicity and speed of migration compared to managing a conversion or new build
• Improved responsiveness to changing business and IT needs
• The opportunity to re-utilise valuable city centre office space
• Access to on-site specialist expertise and support
• A multi-layered high security infrastructure
• Proximity to fibre routes
• Access to multiple carriers and service providers

Retaining control

Businesses not already thinking about altering the physical parameters of their data centres will probably need to do so soon. Instead of refitting existing environments or building new in-house facilities, the most cost-effective and flexible option is to move to a third party data centre.

Global Switch facilities not only provide the optimum IT environment, they are also highly flexible and responsive to commercial and technological demands. By locating in purpose-designed IT space, businesses no longer have to worry about the risks associated with physical limits on space, power and cooling. They retain complete control over their IT infrastructure, while highly skilled building operations teams manage and maintain the physical environment.