So Burch, senior worldwide infrastructure director
of Kemet Electronics, a capacitor manufacturer headquartered in Simpsonville, S.C., decided it was time for
his data center to split.
Even in today’s challenging economy, enterprises
are facing rising internal and external demands for
IT services. When an existing data center can no
longer handle an organization’s IT burden, or when
it becomes necessary to establish a secondary site to
provide enhanced disaster recovery capabilities or
regional network support, an important decision point
has been reached.
For a number of enterprises, the obvious solution
is to add another data center, and for many of those it
means partnering with a colocation service provider
instead of building a new facility of their own.
If you’re considering colocation — or colo, for short
— it’s essential to do your homework, experts say (see
“Colo 101,” page 23). “You absolutely need to do the buy-vs.-build analysis,” says Jeff Paschke, an analyst at Tier1
Research. But having said that, he suggests that “buy”
may often be the best choice. “I am a former enterprise
data center manager, and from what I know now, more
should be using [colocation facilities],” he says.
Financial considerations may play the biggest role in
colocation decisions. “Do you want to go to your board
Once you see you’re beginning to run out
of space, run out of server capacity, [or]
when you’re looking to add or upgrade
an application, that’s when you begin to
look outside.
LYNDA STADTMUELLER, DATA CENTER ANALYST, FROST & SULLIVAN
and ask for $50 million in capex [capital expenditures]
for another data center?” Paschke asks. “The alternative
is to go to a provider and use opex [operating expenses]
and not have to spend money upfront.”
Given the massive investments of time and money
required to build a traditional data center, “fewer orga-
nizations are deciding to build their own satellite data
centers,” says Lynda Stadtmueller, a data center analyst
at technology research company Frost & Sullivan.
In a trend that’s especially prevalent among operations that use time-sensitive applications that require
a local presence, more and more organizations are
leasing space from a colo or hosting provider rather
than building and managing their own data centers,
she explains.
Outer Limits
Most organizations begin thinking about adding a data
center as soon as their existing facility starts maxing
out its physical space or support resources, Stadtmuel-
ler says. “Once you see you’re beginning to run out
of space, run out of server capacity, [or] when you’re
looking to add or upgrade an application, that’s when
you begin to look outside.”
Sometimes the push comes in the form of a business
need — a new initiative that, for instance, requires
a lot of extra computing capacity, or enough to force
your existing data center to use a lot of extra electricity.
Power is usually the gating factor in many older data
centers: Enterprises tend to run out of power options
long before they run out of space.
For many organizations, the idea of building
a second site often arises from a desire to create,
enhance or cut the cost of a business continuity
strategy. “With our new site, we really wanted to
improve on the [recovery] time from any kind of
failure,” Burch says. Kemet also wanted to get out of
a costly relationship with a disaster recovery services
provider, he adds.
Licking Latency
Another motivation for creating a new data center
is to boost system responsiveness for employees and
customers in remote locales. Organizations running
latency-sensitive network applications — those that
power retail and travel websites or financial services,
videoconferencing and content distribution systems,
for example — usually like to place their applications
as close to end users as possible to improve response
times. By splitting a data center into two or more sites,
an organization can more efficiently serve people scattered across a wide area — even if they’re on multiple
continents.
Dayton, Ohio-based LexisNexis, known for its legal
research and workflow services, decided in 2009 to
establish a colo data center in Scottsdale, Ariz., to
better serve customers from a location that’s relatively
immune to storms, earthquakes and other natural
calamities. “We wanted something that was in the
western region of the U.S.,” says Terry Williams, the
company’s vice president of managed technology services. “Location was a huge part of our decision.” The
company already had a data center in Dayton.
Not surprisingly, network availability and perfor-
mance were essential considerations for LexisNexis
as it went about choosing the new site. “The key for
us is network connectivity,” Williams says. “That was
something that couldn’t be compromised on.”
LexisNexis is hardly the only organization that
wants to set up data centers closer to end users for
better service, says Darin Stahl, a data center analyst
at Info-Tech Research Group. “There’s a definite move
toward decentralization, and that’s helping enterprises
that want to open additional data centers,” he says.
Williams says that turning to a colocation provider
— Phoenix-based IO Data Centers, in his case — didn’t
require LexisNexis to compromise on any services or
amenities. “We expected all of the normal things that
a high-tier data center would have in terms of backup
