Colocation & Outsourcing |
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Hyperscale
At the top end of the spectrum , hyperscale user organisations and services providers , such as major public cloud service providers like Microsoft , AWS and Google , are making their presence felt . They need regional hyperscale data centre partners that can support single massively scalable architectures which can seamlessly support additional compute , memory , networking and storage capacity as part of larger computing , distributed computing or grid computing environments . This can mean thousands , even millions of interconnected servers housed in data centres around the world . Apart from the sheer space and scalable power to rack required for handling large additional increments of compute resources as and when needed , hyperscale customers require data centres able to accommodate different IT infrastructures to the norm . Such as servers that are wider than the 19 inch standard , different types
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‘ The core colocation proposition remains to provide a flexible , affordable alternative to maintaining some or all IT in-house .’ |
of network switching and cooling , and specific power distribution needs for gaining maximum power efficiencies .
HPC
Big Data and the Internet of Things are major contributors to the increasing High Performance Computing ( HPC ) requirements of both commercial and not for profit sectors . These environments demand power , cooling and connectivity to support clusters of very high density server racks , some pulling as much 60kWs . However , many colocation facilities in the UK are not served by sufficiently abundant levels of power , let alone direct to grid connections for reducing the potential of outages .
As a work around , most facilities must put in place UPS and auxiliary power systems capable of supporting all workloads running at the same time , along with overhead and enough redundancy to deal with any failure within the
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emergency power supply system itself . This and the specialist cooling needs of HPC are a tall order for many colos today and as a result most are unable to address this high growth market opportunity without significant upgrading .
Conclusion
In summary , the core colocation proposition remains the same as ever : To provide a flexible , affordable alternative to maintaining some or all IT in-house . However , new technologies such as hybrid cloud , combined with increasingly complex and onerous data management requirements , are increasing the stakes for traditional colocation data centre operators . With this the criteria used by customers for choosing a fit for purpose data centre is placing growing emphasis not only on levels of resilience , security and energy efficiency , but also compliance , available power , breadth of connectivity , and the ability to scale for meeting future needs .
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26 | September 2017 |