Economies of scale within the data center are highly beneficial in controlling costs related to cloud computing, says the senior vice president at Europe’s leading provider of colocation services.
“Outsourcing cloud services helps companies that cannot afford to build or continue to expand their own data centers, thereby reducing their capital expenses and operating expenses,” writes Kevin Dean of Interxion in a recent issue of Data Center Knowledge.com. “Facility costs are growing rapidly, and according to the Uptime Institute, the true costs of running a server are often four to five times the cost of the server alone over a five-to-10-year lifetime.”
Cloud computing is shaping up to be the driving force in IT worldwide, with IDC predicting that spending on cloud services will reach $42 billion by 2012. IT organizations are already facing challenges as they confront this “cloud revolution,” and Dean is convinced that outsourcing to carrier-neutral MSPs such as EasyStreet makes the most sense.
“Using a third-party data center equates to great savings in both cost and administration for the business,” he says.
Since EasyStreet opened its doors in the mid ‘90s, the company has been synonymous with superior connectivity. Now — with the worldwide IT community poised to take advantage of the rapidly growing presence of cloud computing — connectivity is even more vital.
“As virtualized infrastructures and the demand for ‘anywhere, anytime’ access continue to increase, connectivity has become as important as processing power for users — meaning a company’s implementation of cloud computing will succeed or fail based on the quality of the end-user connection,” says Kevin Dean, a senior vice president at Interxion, Europe’s leading provider of colocation services.
“Maximum bandwidths and multiple connectivity options will drive adoption of the pay-per-use model, and anything less will have the reverse effect,” he adds in support of colocation offerings such as EasyStreet’s. “A carrier-neutral data center can provide the widest possible range of connectivity options, and with increased choice, comes more opportunities for lower costs.”
Dean’s comments appeared in a recent article in Data Center Knowledge.com.
Despite recent reports about cost-savings associated with green data centers, there still are skeptics who believe the greening might be too little too late.
“There’s a freight train coming that most people do not see, and it’s that you’re going to run out of power and you won’t be able to keep your data center cool enough,” Rob Bernard, the chief environmental strategist for Microsoft, warned attendees at the recent Uptime Symposium 2010 in New York City. “We haven’t fundamentally changed the way we do things. We’ve done a lot of great stuff at the infrastructure level, but we haven’t changed our behavior.”
According to Computerworld, speakers at the conference pointed to a number of different power-sucking culprits, including energy-indifferent application programming, siloed organizational structures, and, ironically, better hardware. They estimated that the average CPU utilization — the number of processor cycles that are actually tasked with doing something — hovered somewhere between 5 percent and 25 percent. (Note: Managed Virtualized Services like those offered by EasyStreet can help with CPU utilization.)
Conference attendees were reminded that in 2006, the U.S. Department of Energy predicted that data center energy consumption would double by 2011 to more than 120 billion kilowatt-hours. According to Computerworld, this prediction seems to be playing out: An ongoing survey from the Uptime Institute found that, from 2005 to 2008, the electricity usage of its members’ data centers grew at an average of about 11 percent a year.
There’s yet more evidence — including a new report from IDC — that a green data center can actually be a cost-saver. In other words, improving IT and data center efficiency not only reduces greenhouse gas emissions but also reduces costs for the enterprise. “This means that the savings or business value derived from improvements far outstrips the incremental capital costs of ‘greening’ the datacenter,” according to Data Center Knowledge.com. “Green IT means business improvement.”
Findings in the new IDC study show that firms ranking high among the Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World — such as Amazon, Toyota, and Nike — have learned that focusing on limiting energy in the data center pays profitable dividends.
“IDC research indicates that companies reducing their metric tons of carbon per data center workload by a factor of 55 percent also incurred 35 percent less cost per user session on a server,” says Data Center Knowledge.com.
More than ever before, the high cost of power is changing dramatically companies’ plans for building data centers. Just a few years ago it seemed to make sense for companies to build oversized data centers to accommodate future growth of the IT infrastructure. But it turns out the cost of supporting unused portions has quickly outdistanced any long-range efficiencies gained by having surplus space.
“We see our customers making very different design decisions than they used to,” Steve Sams, IBM’s VP of global site and facilities services, recently told Network World. “The end result is that they’re saving 30 percent in operational costs over the lifetime of the data center.”
Today’s emphasis is on maximizing efficiency, period. In fact, Sams says a recent IBM study revealed that costs to run a data center quickly surpass outlays for designing and building the facility. If energy costs rise only a conservative 10 percent, he says, the average data center will cost five times more to run over 20 years than it cost to originally build it.
“The most energy efficient data centers in the world are the ones operating at 100 percent capacity,” he says. And in this case, efficiency equates to cost-effectiveness.
