Originally posted to Data Center Frontier by Voices of the Industry.
In this week’s Voices of The Industry, David Mettler, vice president of sales and market director for the United States, IO Data Centers, explores how finding the right colocation provider can help you improve efficiency in the data center.
I recently saw an online ad that boasted $400 per month for a cabinet, power, and 1 Gbps Internet bandwidth. On its face, it seemed like a great deal. But will it ultimately provide the cost and energy efficiency you really need? What if more capacity is needed…or less?
And yet this is how colocation services are often procured. Enterprises will go to market with a generic set of requirements—for example, 10,000 square feet and 1 MW of power. They’ll get baseline pricing and service terms from multiple data center providers, do an apples-to-apples comparison, and typically choose the lowest cost provider.
While this traditional method makes it easier to procure colocation services, under-designing by overbuying doesn’t maximize utilization. These organizations may end up with the lowest cost provider, but they often utilize just 60 percent of capacity—or less. They’ve purchased capacity over efficiency.
Corporate data centers are often guilty of under- or over-buying capacity. When applications start having performance issues, inevitably the knee-jerk IT reaction is to throw more hardware at them, driving capital expenditures up—often needlessly—and frustrating the facilities teams who must figure out how to efficiently power and cool additional equipment purchases.
To read the full article, please click here.
