This customer is a cloud services company. Back at start up a few years ago, the company leveraged another cloud provider for the IT infrastructure: server, network and security equipment. This let the company start up fast and provide for future scalability.

But there was a problem. The company became successful. They were acquiring new clients, generating new revenue and scaling their application. But the costs of scaling were too high. The cloud infrastructure pricing model meant that more sales growth would result in lower and lower margins.

So they took a step back and re-evaluated the infrastructure. It wasn’t that complex; it boiled down to VMware, a few servers, a SAN, switches, security appliances and a recovery model. With a few hours of design time, they came up with a modular approach, designed to scale one rack of equipment at a time. The design was a low-cost, over-engineered solution that was resilient enough to take multiple failures and not miss a beat. What they really needed was a flexible, affordable colocation facility to house these racks.

Here is the list of outsource data center requirements they developed:

High uptime: 99.995%: equal to tier IV data center uptime standards of 27 minutes of downtime per year or less

Hardened data center facilities operated by experts who build to the highest data center certifications and resiliency standards

Access to multiple carriers without monthly cross connect fees: Multiple carriers allowed them to negotiate more flexible contracts with multiple carriers. Multiple carriers allows them to control their uptime and service levels. No monthly cross connect fees means lower monthly costs and no upper limit on carrier diversity.

Data center pricing model that is incremental, or pay as you grow

Midwest data center for low, predictable costs of power

The company chose Lifeline Data Centers because Lifeline was flexible and had all of these features. The cloud services company found better profitability by replacing a cloud infrastructure with their own infrastructure at Lifeline. This “space between” cloud computing and the data center may hold lower costs, better service levels or higher profitability for your organization, too.

If your data center is in-house, you may want to consider outsource data center as well. Infrastructure and cloud computing PDF whitepapers don’t talk enough about flexibility when it comes to a company’s physical data center facilities. Check out our whitepaper on outsourcing a data center.

If you’re a cloud service provider, or an IT professional looking to improve uptime ad reduce data center costs, call 317.423.2591 to find out how you benefit from this “space between.”

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• Jim Warner: Three major issues face telecom on cloud computing services adoption
• Arthur Cole: The Argument For and Against Low-power Servers
• 99.995% uptime – Systems reliability is your credibility in the marketplace
• Royal Pingdom: When software giants trample the little guys

IBM is opening a new, 100,000 square-foot data center in North Carolina to support new computing models, including cloud computing.

The new center is being built at IBM’s facility at Research Triangle Park campus and is expected to provide many services that will enable firms to deploy cloud-based apps quicker and easier.

IBM operates 450 of these data centers worldwide, and this new facility is aimed at helping clients across both the public and private sector operate more efficiently and in a more environmentally sound way, according to CMSwire.com

more of the Cloud Computing Journal article from Hovhannes Avoyan

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