These surveys are providing a picture of strains facing the facilities that cradle the digital economy, as well as the pressure data center and IT managers are under to keep up with demand.

The Uptime Institute, for the first time, recently surveyed 525 data center operators and owners, 71% of whom are in North America. Of respondents, 36% said they will run out of power, cooling and space through 2012.

To meet the need, 40% of the respondents plan to build a new a new data center, and 29% said they would lease additional space in a colocation center. Another 20% said they would move IT workloads to cloud providers.

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It’s an expensive proposition. You might want to investigate your options, including infrastructure as a service (IaaS) , and outsource data center facilities, also known as colocation.

IaaS give you the ability to get out of the computer hardware business. You can move your server images to a shared, virtualized environment and run your servers from the cloud. This is very attractive to many businesses, because of low capital costs and low internal employee requirements.

Colocation, also known as outsource data center, provides hardened data center buildings, reliable power, cooling and access to telecommunications. Many companies move their primary data centers to colocation facilities. These companies reap many benefits from colocation:

99.995% uptime, if the facility meets Tier IV data center uptime standards
Fully redundant data center power and cooling for minimal downtime
Data center security including multiple factor authentication, background checks and physical access control
Access to multiple telecommunications providers

A few outsource data centers offer additional benefits:
Private cages for workspace and growth
Pay-as-you-grow pricing
Carrier neutral data centers with many telecom providers and competitive pricing
No monthly cross connect fees, so telecom pricing is reduced even further
Private office space for business continuity or primary offices

Moving your data center to an affordable colocation facility can be the last data center move you need to make. For many businesses, it makes financial sense to de-couple the data center location from the location of the business headquarters.

Want to learn more? Call Midwest data center facilities provider Lifeline Data Centers at 317.423.2591.

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“Way back when, convergence was voice and data,” recalled Jeffrey Kaplan, managing director of ThinkStrategies Inc., a consultancy in Wellesley, Mass. Today’s convergence “is around centralized control of a traditional data center environment, while at the same time permitting self-service provisioning around authorized end users,” he said.

Enterprises can build their own converged data center infrastructure, but the hassle is a hurdle, according to experts. Hence the arrival of third-party converged infrastructures: essentially, plug-and-play virtual computing parcels from such vendors as Hewlett-Packard Inc., with its BladeSystem Matrix; and Cisco Systems Inc., with its Unified Computing System (UCS), which combines Cisco servers and networking with VMware Inc.’s vSphere and EMC Corp. storage.

These software products are integrated, tested, optimized and supported with no finger-pointing — a big plus, according to Geoff Woollacott, engagement manager and senior analyst at Technology Business Research Inc., in Hampton, N.H.

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• Reaching limits on power, cooling, or floor space
• Improving primary data center uptime (reliability)
• Meeting data center compliance or data center certification requirements
• Consolidating data centers
• Moving out of an existing building; moving a data center
• Reducing power costs
• Swapping primary data center and disaster recovery center sites
• Centralizing the hub of a wide area network

Selecting the right wholesale data center is one of the most critical strategic IT decisions a company will make. A sensible CIO strategy would include these data center requirements:

• Industry veteran data center leadership, directly involved in day-to-day operations
• True N+N data center redundancy with 99.995% uptime (Tier IV data center uptime levels)
• Data center certifications – SAS 70 data center, TIA 942 compliant data center, and industry-specific compliance
• Highly-customized data center consulting and managed services
• Simple data center pricing model
• Low data center power costs, billed on usage
• Private cages for security, high density and long-term growth
• Access to multiple telecommunications providers
• Carrier neutral data center with no cross connect fees

The primary data center is the heartbeat of a company. The wrong decision on data center providers can cost a company dearly for the life of a contract. Choose a wholesale hardened data center facility that works to support the company’s specific data center requirements. Consider affordable colocation options. Consider Midwest colocation provider Lifeline Data Centers.

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• Reaching limits on power, cooling, or floor space
• Improving primary data center uptime (reliability)
• Meeting data center compliance or data center certification requirements
• Consolidating data centers
• Moving out of an existing building; moving a data center
• Reducing power costs
• Swapping primary data center and disaster recovery center sites
• Centralizing the hub of a wide area network

In Part 2 of this series, we’ll address the power, cooling, and floor space limits that companies experience as they grow and change the primary data center.

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The very nature of data centers, that is, the presence of multitudes of computer systems, supporting electrical and telecommunication setups, power backups, storage facilities etc makes the job a totally expert-centric job. The basic idea of relocation is to upgrade your existing facilities, aiding in business continuity etc. Sometimes you need to relocate your server farm only to another part of the same building or top a nearby locality, but sometimes due to mergers and acquisitions, a need may arise when your data center has to be moved to any other part of the country or even to another continent.

But involving experts in the job would ensure that that job is done satisfactorily, safely and quickly without giving any undue concerns to you. As you know, the IT-related systems are physically delicate and as such, any improper handling can harm them. Likewise, the data contained in the storages are highly valuable and may be the life-line of your company which has to be preserved at any cost.

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The company was interested in Lifeline Data Centers for a few reasons. First, they could aggregate bandwidth from multiple carriers with no monthly cross-connect fees. This let them keep bandwidth costs low and maintain good margins. They also liked Lifeline’s data center power redundancy: Lifeline’s N+N power and HVAC configuration could support their needs for high uptime. One of the company’s owners liked the idea of Lifeline “always keeping an eye on the power.”

Last week, I spoke to them again. Some parts of their business are in decline, and other parts are growing. To cut costs, they are moving all their equipment out of the old outsource data center and into their new office building.

Are they really cutting costs?

What would a prolonged power outage cost this company ? ALL of the services they deliver rely on power, Internet services and application availability. Will their customers stay customers if a backhoe digs up the power line in front of the new office building and knocks out power for 8 hours? Or will the clients look elsewhere at the hundreds of vendors offering the same services for lower prices?

What is the company’s cost of losing a deal to a competitive Internet Services Provider? Will the competition win the deal because they have data center compliance, certifications, F5 tornado resistant data center buildings, and more telecom choices?

Who’s keeping an eye on your power? Who’s making sure that your computer room reliability is better than your competition? Who’s helping you take care of your clients?

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Does it really matter? I can understand why you might use the size of a data center as a starting point for selection. Here is a list of other key issues you should also consider:

• Does the provider deliver 99.995 data center uptime (less than 27 minutes of downtime per year)?
• Is the data center pricing model easy to understand?
• How does the outsource data center charge you for power and cooling?
• Does the provider offer hardened data center facilities, built to withstand tornadoes and other disasters?
• How is the data center power redundancy engineered? Are there single points of failure?
• How many telecommuncations providers are available?
• Does the outsource data center charge monthly cross connect fees?
• Are private cages, shared space, office and staging space available?
• Are the critical power. cooling, and security systems maintained in-house or outsourced?
• How long has the data center provider been in business?
• Who owns the outsource data center? Are the owners involved in daily operations?
• How much data center expertise does the outsource data center team possess?

So who is Indianapolis’ largest data center? It depends, of course, on how you measure it.

• Data center square feet occupied
• Data center square feet available
• Campus size
• Data center square feet available with room for expansion

Here are the facts about Lifeline Data Centers:

• Two locations
• 70,000 square feet of data center floor space available in existing buildings
• 30,000 square feet of data center floor space occupied
• Downtown building, along with a 41-acre second campus
• Room for 260,000 square feet of data center, 300,000 square feet of office

Looking to improve your computer system reliability and reduce costs? Moving your data center? Find out more about affordable colocation. Call Lifeline at 317.423.2591.

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The task was to upgrade a 25-year-old data center, built by AT&T during the 1980s to handle mainframe computing. The building was 125,000 square feet; the data center space, 80,000 square feet. In this case, modernization required ripping and replacing most of the facility’s power and cooling infrastructure — all without incurring system downtime.

Gale, the regional data center director for the Denver-based colocation company ViaWest, led the charge, and the process took 18 months.

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Reuters has reported that Gartner is forecasting server shipment growth percentage in the range of mid to high single digits for 2010; the research firm predicts that the revenue growth rate will lag slightly behind shipment growth, however. These encouraging numbers follow a rather dismal 2009, which saw server revenue decline by 18.3%, with a unit shipment decline of 16.6%, according to Gartner. Research firm IDC estimates server revenue decline at 18.9%, down to $43.2 billion, with unit shipments down 18.6% to 6.6 million units. Thus, IDC’s estimate suggests that unit shipments and revenue kept fairly close pace in their decline, despite Gartner’s estimate that revenue demonstrated a larger percentage decrease than did unit shipments.

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