Issue link: https://cp.revolio.com/i/394834
22 | THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL www.datacenterjournal.com Make the Best of what you have Before spending too much time considering your data center options, take stock of what you already have available. For instance, if your company is pushing against the capacity limits of an existing data center, then before you look into building a new one, evaluate the current facility. Have you already maximized capacity through virtualization, consolida- tion and other standard industry practices? Have you maximized density, and could a (perhaps more efficient) cooling-system upgrade give you more room to grow in this area? If your budget is tight or you're concerned about the economy, wring- ing the most out of your current facilities may give you some extra time to ensure that you can afford a new data center or to alleviate your concerns about industry or economic growth. ConsIDer outsourCIng If an IT expansion is in order, a purely traditional data center construc- tion project is not the only possibility. Companies are increasingly opting for mixed models that combine two or more approaches. "For example, a large company may decide to source some applications on an SaaS basis, use a public cloud or hosted private cloud managed by a leading vendor for other applications, and keep legacy and business-critical applications in a traditional on-premise data center," said LeClair. Outsourcing may serve either as the sole IT model or as a supplementary part of a broader IT strategy. It greatly reduces or eliminates capital costs and can be ideal for companies that want to keep a minimal (or no) IT staff onsite. But this approach requires some care. "Outsourc- ing is becoming a more popular option for companies of all sizes and in all industries," said LeClair. "I think the most critical factor in determining when to outsource a specific application, function or set of capabilities is whether or not that item is critical to a business and is something on which the business wants to differentiate. Applications that are less critical and don't necessarily contribute to a company's value proposition tend to be good candidates for outsourcing. is is the reason why some of the first applications to be com- monly outsourced through SaaS were common business applications such as HR and finance applications and standard productivity applications like email and collaboration." Also, outsourcing need not be an all-or-nothing proposition. Companies that, for instance, want to keep control of their IT hardware but avoid the hassles of peripheral tasks like data center cooling, power distribution, managing network connectivity and so on can opt for coloca- tion. LeClair notes that "increasingly, we are seeing many companies choose to run a private cloud that is exclusive to them but on an outsourced basis through a hosted service provider. ese hosted private clouds can offer the best of both worlds. ey can provide the data security and isolation, performance, and control of a private cloud without requiring companies to run the cloud themselves. All of the skills and personnel required, and even the facility, power and cooling, can be outsourced to a cloud service provider with the expertise to run the cloud efficiently." But for companies that follow the outsourcing route, paying close attention to the details of the contract is critical. Here is where knowing what you need from your IT resources is vital to a success- ful project. "Particularly for outsourced or public cloud services, close attention to the details of SLAs is important," said LeClair. "Many services will offer a service with 100% or five-nines availability. However, upon closer examination of the SLA, the penalties for missing the SLA may be very small, it may have challenging conditions that must be met to qualify, or the events that are counted as downtime may not meet the company's expectation." If you DeCIDe to BuIlD Undertaking a traditional data center construction project is a big deal—and an expensive one. e options are diverse, ranging from containerized data centers to dedicated buildings. Location is a major decision. Planning ahead—and planning carefully for contingencies—is critical to completing the project on time and on budget, something that most organizations fail to do. But for those companies that choose to build (or combine a traditional data center with some form of outsourc- ing), a number of industry trends are worth noting. Server virtualization and consolida- tion have been fairly typical practice for a number of years, but LeClair notes an emerging trend with regard to servers: he sees "a shi in the type of servers being used in data centers. Traditionally servers deployed into the data center were typically used for approximately five years. Today, servers for cloud systems tend to be more streamlined and standard across the data center and have a life expectancy of two to three years maximum. ere are also many applications that require servers outside of the data center—these may be industrial applications or devices that are part of the Internet of ings. ese servers that are going to the edge are designed to be installed for a much longer period of time (7 to 10 years)." In addition, many companies with on-premises data centers are pursuing the private-cloud model, which attempts to replicate the advantages of the cloud on a smaller (and proprietary) scale. Alterna- tively, a hybrid approach can involve some aspects of a private cloud and some of the public cloud. "e cloud is having the most profound impact on companies that are looking to build or create new data centers today," said LeClair. "Increasingly, com- panies are moving to the cloud instead of building new data centers in the manner of the past 20 years. And if they are building them, they are approaching it differently from how they used to." CoMPany sIzes e size of a company will have a number of potential effects on its data cen- ter strategy. Typically, smaller companies will have less capital at their disposal, as well as a smaller IT staff (if they have any). LeClair summarizes by saying that "in a small company where IT resources are at a premium and may be more generalist, its approach will be different from a large company that considers IT to be a core differentiator for its business and has a large in-house team of IT specialists." As a result, a small company "may find a pure cloud-based data center highly appealing, as it will free the company's IT resources to focus on more important matters than ba- sic data center operations, whereas a large company may want more of its data center managed internally for cost reasons. Larger companies also tend to have more proprie- tary, legacy applications than smaller firms and the needs of these types of applications may result in additional considerations on how and where to run them." For midsize companies, the situation may be less clear. Again, however, a mixed model involving some internally man-