Archive for the ‘Colocation Power Costs’ Category
Are power and cooling limiting your data center?
I just read a great whitepaper by Eaton, the power products manufacturer, called “Is power your weakest link in data center flexibility?” The whitepaper talks about how higher densities and larger power footprints are causing companies to outgrow their data center power. Power is a limiting factor in data center growth.
Cooling is close behind, because for every 1 kW of power required to run IT equipment, about 1 kW of cooling is required to remove the heat.
Eaton’s modular power is a sensible approach to building an incremental power infrastructure in-house.
Colocation is a sensible alternative to eliminate the power and cooling problems. But all wholesale colocation providers are not created equal. The provider will need to allow room for growth, and provide usage based power billing. This approach providers for more granular, incremental growth in the costs of operating data center floor space, power and cooling.
Colocation or cloud computing? Which one is right for your critical computer systems?
In simple terms, colocation (also known as outsourced data center or wholesale colocation) is high-tech real estate. Companies use colocation to solve the problems of hardened data center buildings, power, cooling, telecommunications and security. Companies use colocation to solve these problems without losing any control of their IT infrastructure and systems. Colocation is about control of IT without the worry of building facilities.
Cloud computing comes in many forms. Companies use cloud computing to access applications and resources without owning hardware or maintaining an IT staff . Cloud computing is about applications and solutions without the worry of IT staff, IT infrastructure, and building facilities.
When comparing cloud computing providers, make sure you understand the incremental costs. Simpler pricing models are usually better. Understand the built-in backup systems and redundancies and how you can build in higher reliability if you need to.
When shopping amongst colocation providers, make sure you understand the incremental costs. Simpler data center pricing models are usually better. Keep costs low by choosing a provider with low power costs. Midwest colocation providers tend to have lower data center power costs than other areas of the United States. Affordable colocation is available in many regions of the country. Most companies today look for a minimum 99.995% uptime carrier neutral data centers with no cross connect fees.
Use colocation to maintain control of your applications and infrastructure without the worries of building facilities. Use cloud computing when you’re looking to solve application problems with a minimum of IT overhead.
In this era of cheap-and-reliable rent-a-data centers, does it make sense for a company to build a new data center on its own anymore?
Amazon’s data center guru James Hamilton is pretty clear that he sees no reason for most companies to keep constructing new data centers from scratch, but if they have a huge compute load and really have to, they should build way more capacity than they need and sell off the excess a la Amazon itself.
While Hamilton has a vested interest in people moving their compute loads to Amazon’s infrastructure, his build big or don’t build at all mantra resonates with several other IT experts. The consensus: It makes sense for most companies to trust their data center needs to the real experts in data centers — the companies that build and run data centers as a business. More companies will start moving more of their new compute loads — maybe not necessarily all the mission critical stuff — to the big cloud operators. That roster includes the aforementioned players as well as Google, Microsoft, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle and others that are building out more of their own data center capacity for use by customers.
More of the GigaOM post from Barb Darrow
Future data center expansion will be happening in developing markets like China, Brazil and Argentina, but such locations may not meet the requirements of data centers today and the requirements that will be necessary in the future. In fact, these five regions may not be the most obvious places to build a data center, but they might save your company a lot of expense.
Data center requirements have changed over the last 10-15 years. A decade or two ago, the two top criteria to consider when choosing a location were network accessibility and access to skilled talent. Fiber networks that connect data centers to the rest of the world were concentrated around metropolitan areas like New York City and San Francisco, but that is no longer the case. Sure, there will always be distance and latency concerns to consider, but the proliferation of high-speed network infrastructure means it is no longer the driving factor it once was. Additionally, data center talent was also limited to where the data centers were. That still holds true, except data centers have spread considerably and so has the skills base. In addition, remote monitoring and management solutions now make it possible for IT administrators to do most of their data center work remotely.
More of the GigaOM article from Jim Latimer
Mark Davidson, Sustainability Officer for JouleX, an innovator in enterprise energy management systems for data centers, distributed office environments and facilities.
Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) has been called “The Holy Grail” of data center energy metrics so often that we actually found it impossible to find out who coined the term. As time, technology and sustainability efforts evolve, the PUE metric is no longer the stopping point for energy efficiency measurement, but it has become just one more piece in the larger picture.
What does PUE do? It measures how much of the energy entering a data center facility is used to power the computing devices within, versus the amount used for cooling and overhead of the facility. That’s it.
More of the Data Center Knowledge article from Mark Davidson
This year marks the 10th anniversary of the 1,200-square-foot data center at the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering — that means the facility has been operating three years longer than CIO and vice president of operations Joanne Kossuth had originally planned. Now, even though the school needs a facility with more capacity and better connectivity, Kossuth has been forced to back-burner the issue because of the iffy economic times.
“Demand has certainly increased over the years, pushing the data center to its limits, but the recession has tabled revamp discussions,” she says.
Like many of her peers, including leaders at Citigroup and Marriott International, Kossuth has had to get creative to eke more out of servers, storage and the facility itself. To do so, she’s had to re-examine the life cycle of data and applications, storage array layouts, rack architectures, server utilization, orphaned devices and more.
More of the Computerworld article from Sandra Gittlen
Is your organization considering Chicago disaster recovery data centers? Chicago colocation and disaster recovery providers offer many options. Are these best for your organization?
Many factors play in to the selection secondary data center and office space locations. A good CIO strategy includes multiple geographies in an evaluation of disaster recovery centers. For some organizations Midwest colocation outside of Chicago might be a better solution.
Standard features that many organizations look for when considering disaster recovery centers include:
Hardened data center facilities – With Midwest colocation, F5 tornado resistant data centers building are important, along with earthquake resistant facilities in some areas.
99.995% uptime or better – This is the uptime level expected from Tier IV data centers. Some IT professionals consider the uptime is a DR center to be less important than in the primary data center. If your organization is doing real-time or near-real time data replication, data center uptime in your disaster recovery center is likely as important as in your primary enterprise data center.
Multiple carriers with no cross-connect fees – Access to multiple telecom carriers ensures diverse and reliable connectivity in the event of a disaster, or on an ongoing basis with real-time replication. Data centers with no monthly cross connect fees significantly reduce ongoing costs.
Data center compliance and certification – Compliance and certifications in the disaster recovery center are just as important as the primary data center.
Data center pricing model – Simple is better. Most organizations seem to prefer to pay for power, cooling and space incrementally as they use it.
Advantages to Midwest data centers located outside of Chicago include:
- Geographic diversity, especially for Chicago-based organizations.
- Overall lower costs, including, lower data center power costs, lower costs of construction labor, and lower data center capital costs.
- A theoretically lower risk from placing the disaster recovery center outside of one of the USA’s five largest cities.
Wholesale colocation providers offer the most flexibility for organizations that prefer to own and control their own telecom connections, network, servers and storage. Some wholesale data centers offer disaster recovery office space. This space can be custom fit by the organization to use for emergency call centers or workspace recovery.
Considering disaster recovery options in Chicago? Consider Midwest colocation providers outside of Chicago in your search.
Long-term data center power costs savings can be huge with outsource computer room facilities
2011
Considering and managing the long-term costs of power for the data center can have great financial impact . Many companies have found that outsource data center facilities (colocation) can help them reduce data center power costs, while improving critical systems availability (uptime).
Companies that pay over 6 centers per kilowatt hour stand to save money by considering outsource data center facilities. Some of these high-tech data center facilities offer power billed as you use it. Lower power costs in the data center mean lower long-term IT costs for your organization.
One note: don’t forget to include the costs of cooling in your power cost estimates. The cost of electricity to cool your computer room is roughly the same as the cost to run the IT equipment. A few outsource data center pricing models include power for cooling in the per kilowatt hour pricing. This type of data center pricing model makes it very easy to forecast growth and change in your data center.
As an added bonus, many outsource data center facilities offer 99.995% uptime. That equates to 28 minutes of downtime or less per year. If the provider offers features like F5 tornado resistant facilities along with power and cooling redundancy, you may be able to save money while improving overall data center uptime.
Ask yourself these questions:
What is the cost of power at your present data center?
Does downtime cost your company sales, credibility, or lost clients?
What sort of resiliency and redundancy (uptime) have you built into your data center?
Talk to a colocation facility where you can reduce data center power costs while at the same time minimizing your data center downtime.
NREIOnline.com: U.S. Ranks As Top Choice for Companies Seeking Low-Risk Data Center Locations
2011
Data centers support business-critical information technology systems, and any downtime can cost millions in lost revenue and even threaten the viability of a business.
Against that backdrop, the United States ranks as the top choice for companies seeking low-risk data center locations, reflecting the country’s relatively low cost of energy and favorable business environment, according to a new study.
Cushman & Wakefield and engineering consulting firm hurley palmer flatt released details of the Data Center Risk Index on June 15.
The index, which evaluated risk in 20 leading and emerging markets and across key regional centers, scored India the least favorable with China also near the bottom of the rankings (see table).
More of the article from National Real Estate Investor Online
Like the unfortunate person who continually diets but only seems to gain more weight, power-hungry data centers — despite adopting virtualization and power management techniques — only seem to be consuming more energy than ever, to judge from some of the talks at the Uptime Symposium 2010, held this week in New York.
“There is a freight train coming that most people do not see, and it is that you are going to run out of power and you will not be able to keep your data center cool enough,” Rob Bernard, the chief environmental strategist for Microsoft, told attendees at the conference.
Power usage is not a new issue, of course. 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 (kWh). 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.
But despite all the talk in green computing, data centers don’t seem to be getting more power-efficient. In fact, they seem to be getting worse.
More of the Network World article from Joab Jackson
