Rising to the challenge: The centre of attention

Rising power costs, security, legislative mandates and the rise of blade server deployments in a pan-European technology refresh are making outsourced co-location operators an attractive alternative to in-house IT deployments. CXO interviews Anthony Foy, Group Managing Director, Interxion, to find out why outsourcing your data centre can have considerable benefits to an organisation’s operational performance levels and, ultimately, its bottom line.

As one of Europe’s largest carrier-independent data centre and managed services companies, Interxion has built and manages 23 data centres in 13 cities, spanning 11 countries across Europe. As Group Managing Director, Anthony Foy is responsible for heading up the company’s core focus on maintaining the highest standards of customer satisfaction and developing effective customer partnerships, in all its countries of operation.

For some time, now organisations of all kinds have become increasingly dependent on in-house data centres to act as the nerve-centres of their operations, but that reliance is now being sorely tested by changes to the technology landscape and the sophisticated requirements of executives.
IT is today required not only to run mundane operations, but to underpin and automate commerce, supply-chain, logistics, procurement and other critical systems. Many of the world’s most valuable organisations now rely on IT to be storefront as well as engine room and are desperate to harness new technologies to reshape the way they conduct business with partners and customers.

Foy explains: “Increased commercial and technical demands mandates an intelligent IT infrastructure strategy that reduce capital expenditure whilst enhancing operational performance. Companies need to ensure they can operate this highly complex environment with the 100 percent uptime that their customers demand. To build a highly resilient infrastructure that is scalable, many of these enterprises have spent over five million euros, while others have chosen to leverage subject matter experts and share infrastructure via a third part datacenter vendor.”

As the trend for outsourcing continues, even the most Luddite of decision-makers recognises the value of technology as a force of competitive differentiation, many forward-looking leaders are now questioning how much of that functionality needs to be kept under their own roof. Total outsourcing and offshoring have developed mixed reputations, but using third-party expertise to assume control for some technology needs is becoming particularly attractive as the complexity of in house data centre threatens to spiral out of control.

Part of the challenge for IT chiefs is that today’s data centres differ radically from the days when mainframe and Unix servers dominated server rooms.

In particular, the arrival of low-cost blade servers running familiar Windows and Linux environments – clustered to aggregate processing power and provide failover resilience – are becoming hugely attractive alternatives to the expensive, proprietary, monolithic hosts of old. However, although blades afford tremendous flexibility they also cause deployment headaches. With electricity tariffs sky-high, the power draw and heat generated by hundreds of servers stacked side by side are becoming important financial considerations.

Cooling data centres not designed for today’s racks of servers adds to the power being consumed, and designing data centres is becoming a specialist area of knowledge, requiring arcane knowledge of chilling units, uninterruptible power supplies and the physics of heat dissipation. By overcompensating for the problem, many firms can also invest in far too large a power budget for their systems. Already, the acquisition cost of a server is being overtaken by the cost of electricity over its lifespan.

“The challenge most business faces today is in how to deploy blade servers more intelligently in smaller spaces, concentrating more power into racks and hence more computers into a single rack. While we were deploying blade servers at an average of 3kW three years ago, today we have made significant investment in upgrading our data centre to deliver up to 20kW to meet demand from our 1000 plus customers – this trend is across all markets and across all sectors,” comments Foy.

‘Server spaghetti’ is also a real issue for larger firms. Intel research suggests that the number of servers installed globally has grown by a factor of 150 since the mid-1990s and many companies today struggle even to understand what assets they own, rendering themselves liable to overpayment (or illegal underpayment) for software licences, inefficiency and a resulting threat to security. The situation is becoming more complex as firms fold together voice and data requirements. Although virtualisation software from firms such as VMware, Microsoft and XenSource is making it possible to better utilise server power and consolidate workloads onto fewer machines, capitalising on the technology requires a new set of skills.

And, at the same time as researching and deploying these leading-edge technologies, IT leaders are being charged with implementing strategies that support information security and Sarbanes-Oxley, Basel 2 and other 50 plus IT/data corporate governance mandates in Europe are adding to their burden of responsibility.

“Some firms will swallow the capital cost of building new data centres and hiring staff to help them exploit new technologies and control multiplying server farms, switches and storage systems. However, tight supplies of necessary infrastructure components, also makes building new data centres problematic and costly. Unsurprisingly then, many others are seeking new ways to manage technology ensuring availability with going to the expense of building, managing and staffing an in house data centre,” adds Foy.

Of this latter group, many will seek specialist help and outsource some of their burdens. One tactic that is becoming increasingly attractive is to use co-location partners such as Interxion that act as ‘hotels’ for the various IT needs of many customers.

Co-location companies act as data centre hosts on behalf of organisations, removing a layer of complexity for IT managers. At their simplest, these hosts offer internet connectivity, peering points and back-up so that data and communications are safely maintained even in the event of problems in firms’ primary, onsite data centres. Increasingly though, they are also being leant on as sources of valuable skill sets and as providers of critical managed services.

These companies don’t just offer an alternative to capital expenditure on infrastructure; they also provide access to multiple connectivity partners and operational staff who know how to manage complex, heterogeneous ICT infrastructures. “This is where the outsourced carrier independent data centre becomes very compelling. Our data centres typically have between 20-50 networks operating in them. We therefore deliver multiple fail over partners, but also substantially reduce the cost of connectivity in most instances – some customers can cut the cost of bandwidth by 50 percent.”

By using this flexible source of external assistance, firms can improve system uptime and availability and make services more measurable without having to hire more staff or make costly upfront bets on technologies.

Some conservative companies will still have issues with the notion of infrastructure residing offsite, but as companies like Google, Salesforce.com and Flicker, for example, reshape the way we think about accessing services, it is likely that the attractions of these data centre hosts will continue to grow.