Recently an article in Informationweek raised 5 issues when it comes to data centers in 2013 (if you follow our Twitter feed you may have seen us send out the link). The number one issue raised in the article was about rising power consumption and costs incurred by data centers going forward, as so many more applications move to being cloud based and more bandwidth intesive.
From a business perspective, many companies are moving towards virtual servers to cut down on the total number of machines they need to maintain, provide power and cooling for, and to save on internal space. Any company that maintains a good number of servers internally for their employees and customer use has likely investigated virtualization, if not already moved to it.
However, even with virtualized servers, while overall maintenance might take up less time and computing resources, there’s still a sizeable cost for power and environmentals along with bandwidth. In fact, the InformationWeek article estimates that cost of energy is now 25% of total operating costs, among the top of the total operations expenses list.
Along with the actual cost to run/maintain, the other crucial issue is power loss – if your servers are down for any given amount of time, how does that impact employee and client use? I know lately we’ve been touching on weather related issues, but ’tis the season here in the Northeast. One major storm that brings down infrastructure could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost productivity and revenue. A few years ago a blizzard here in Massachusetts caused telco and power outages for businesses here and in Rhode Island for over a week. A sustained outage like that could literally be a business killer.
If your company is in a position where power costs and concerns over outages are affecting you, then considering colocation is one of the better options available to you. Power and environmental costs are usually part of the overall monthly costs, and typically tend to be much lower than your local power costs when broken down. In addition to decreased power costs based on consumption, typically the threat of power loss is greatly reduced along with having increased performance thanks to larger bandwidth connectivity at data centers. Even with many businesses now moving to Metro Ethernet to help connect their infrastructure, bandwidth availability when using colocation tends to be higher and much less costly.
Here in the Northeast, data center space can usually be found within reasonable driving distance as well as with very competitive rates. Our colocation data center in Providence, for example, is easily reached from a number of places in Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. Having a centralized location, along with very competitive power and bandwidth rates, means businesses can move many of their power-hungry servers and processes offsite – which saves them money while increasing their performance and availability at the same time.
Unless you’re looking into powering your network using a melting glacier like one of the proposed datacenters in the InformationWeek article, taking a deeper look at your power expenses may show that colocation is an easy way to reduce your costs. If you’d like more information about how colocation can benefit your business, just let us know by clicking the “Contact Us” button to the right for a no-commitment consultation. Or, you can give us a call at 877-634-2638 any time.
