Colocation: Make the Future of IT a Reality

The movement to colocation-or colo-is accelerating and will have profound implications for enterprises and service providers. Colocation involves renting space in a third-party data center and can also include a mix of hardware, software, and services. The tactic is surging at a 16% compound annual growth rate through 2020, from $25.70 billion in 2015 to $54.13. By 2018, 65% of companies’ IT assets will be off-site in colocation, hosting, and cloud data centers, according to IDC, while 33% of IT “staff” will be employees of third-party service providers.

“Colocation continues to be the bedrock for much of Cloud 2.0,” says Katie Broderick, research director, 451 Research. “The global colocation market is the physical (facilities and networking) underpinning of both enterprises’ off-premises computing, as well as hosting and cloud service providers’ value-add services.”

A big reason for colocation’s success is the opportunity to shift from a pricey CapEx (capital expense) budget line item to a much less expensive OpEx (operating expense) model. However there are a number of other benefits—and implications—to consider before going colo.

Top considerations when deciding to go colo—and picking the right partner—include location, pricing, security, and offerings. Location is key, because the facility has to be easily accessible by your IT staff, close to a power source, and should be in a safe area—i.e. hurricane belts, flood plains, and earthquake zones should be avoided.

Pricing is important because colo users are typically looking to lower their costs and make them more manageable from a budgeting perspective, i.e. usage-based pricing and monthly fees. Other factors that come into play include real estate, power, redundancy, and risk mitigation costs.

Read More@ http://www.cio.com/article/3087609/cloud-computing/colocation-make-the-future-of-it-a-reality.html

The rise of the micro-data center

The recent 451 Research London conference threw up some interesting thoughts on how data centers might develop over the next few years, where micro-data centers – down to and including the ‘Bring Your Own’ variety – could play an important role.

Some interesting thoughts came to the fore during the recent `Business of Cloud, Data Center and Hosting Summit’ run by analyst firm 451 Research. While the background was painted from sets of figures based on solid research of trends in cloud usage across the cloud services marketplace, the best thoughts were of the still-arguable, ‘we-reckon…’ variety.

European colocation market growth buoyed by M&A and Safe Harbour, says CBRE

The European datacentre colocation market continues to go from strength-to-strength, with investment in the sector nearing $9bn in 2014, according to research from global property advisor CBRE.

The organisation cited the rise in mergers and acquisitions in the colocation sector during the second quarter of 2015 as a key investment driver, and has fuelled market growth by 6% overall in 2015.

The second half of 2015 has seen Equinix make a $3.6bn bid to acquire fellow colocation provider Telecity Group, a deal that looks set to shake up the competitive landscape across Europe in 2016. This is particularly in the wake of the European Commission’s ruling that both firms must sell-off some of their facilities in London, Amsterdam and Frankfurt for the deal to go ahead.

Aside from mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity, the research picks up the uptick in interest from large-scale IT infrastructure and web companies in opening datacentres in Europe, with London emerging as the most popular location.

“IT infrastructure companies are dominating the European datacentre market. We’ve seen overall demand dynamics mirror what these firms are doing,” said Andrew Jay, head of datacentre systems at CBRE.

“The implications are wider as well, with operators seeing proof that deploying an on-off ramp to the cloud in a datacentre will attract enterprise customers, so securing the IT Infrastructure providers to your premises is becoming vital.”


Read More: http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500258245/European-colocation-market-growth-buoyed-by-MA-and-Safe-Harbour-says-CBRE

Texas Colo with Efficient Data Center Cooling System Launched

Aligned Data Centers, a data center provider formed earlier this year, has launched its first colocation facility in Plano, Texas, featuring a water-efficient data center cooling system designed by its sister company Inertech, whose systems are also deployed at eBay, Lenovo, and Telus data centers, among others.

In addition to using very little water, the design of the cooling system is the primary enabler for Aligned’s unusual colocation business model. Offering a compromise between physical data center capacity and elastic cloud infrastructure, the company offers what it calls on-demand colocation services, meaning customers only pay for the capacity they actually use, with the ability to scale their deployment up or down as they go along.

Aligned COO Thomas Doherty told us in an earlier interview that the cooling system’s modular design was what gave the provider the flexibility to change the amount of capacity provisioned for any single client on-demand.

In addition to the Plano facility, Aligned is building a larger data center in Phoenix and scouting for additional locations in California, Illinois, Virginia, and New Jersey, the company said in a statement.


Read More: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2015/11/23/texas-colo-efficient-data-center-cooling-system-launched/

Modular data centers new target for Aecom and Project Frog

The announcement of a partnership between Project Frog, an innovator in the design and delivery of smart buildings, and Aecom, a global infrastructure firm with more than two decades of experience building data centers, has led to the announcement of their combined Rapid Deployment Team focused on the delivery of data center buildings with a modular infrastructure to customers who would not be well served by the traditional build process for a major data center facility.

Based around the Project Frog Converge flat-pack data center building platform with the addition of Aecom's integration expertise the partnership expects to be able deliver rapidly constructed modular data center structure suitable for builds in the 1 MW to 50 MW range, which covers the vast majority of data center projects.

The two companies expect the standardized, two-story data center structures with stacked data center modules to reduce the costs associated with design, construction and deployment as well as allowing for leaner operational costs. Ease of construction and deployment could also encourage customers to scale data center builds in a more on-demand fashion, reducing the tendency to over provision data center builds.


Read More: http://www.zdnet.com/article/modular-data-centers-new-target-for-aecom-and-project-frog/

Readying Your Data Center for the Internet of Things

As 2015 draws to a close, companies are looking ahead to the New Year and crafting business plans for a successful 2016. As you look to refine your ever-evolving Internet of Things (IoT) strategy, it would be wise to position data center infrastructure at the core of your plan.

As IoT continues to develop, computer systems and communications networks are in overdrive trying to keep up with the demand and scale of all the data that is being generated. In order to meet these increasing infrastructure capacity requirements, a growing number of organizations are moving away from traditional on-premises corporate IT facilities and turning to service providers that deliver data center services such as colocation and cloud computing. In fact, market research firm IDC reports IoT alone will generate the need for 750 percent more data center capacity in service-provider facilities than consumed today.

What Colocation Delivers
For companies that may be new to data center colocation, its benefits range from security to transparency. With colocation, instead of maintaining computing systems in a private data center, an organization houses them in a data center owned and managed by a colocation provider.

The colocation customer organization retains all control over its systems, but the colocation provider manages the data center security, network connections, power, and cooling. In some cases, the colocation provider offers value-added services to customers, such as a data center infrastructure management (DCIM) system that provides additional layers of visibility and control.

One of the top benefits of colocation is scalability. Additional capacity can be brought on quickly, which is a key requirement for fast-growing IoT deployments. Colocation also allows for lower total cost of ownership, meaning organizations can typically maintain their data center operations for much lower total cost than they could build and operate a private data center.

Read More: http://www.iotevolutionworld.com/fog/articles/413555-readying-data-center-the-internet-things.htm