Now We Have Cloud, What’s a Data Centre for?

The sheer volume of media hype about cloud computing in recent years has tended to obscure the important fact that there are other alternatives to traditional on-premise ICT. Data centre services from co-location—your own kit in dedicated professional facilities—to hosting and more recently private cloud. Most business leaders are also aware of Software-as-a-Service [SaaS] and indeed other elements of ICT delivered online. What is not so generally recognised is that such services can be direct and private as well as from a cloud provider.

The modern data centre is in fact central to almost everything we do in and with ICT. The Internet, the web and the cloud live in it, all of our communications go through it and it serves the data from mobile devices as readily as the backup and failover copies of massive corporate data sets on which business continuity depends. In short, today’s digital society depends on its investment in data centres and the their standards continue to improve almost daily. Sheer physical protection, from fire or flood or earthquake or physical attack, is combined with some of the highest level security measures in the world.

Availability, Reliability, Stability, Predictability

That is all to support what a data centre offers above all else and all alternatives—as near total Reliability as is possible in today’s world. In ICT terms we talk of Availability—your systems will be running very, very close to 100% of the time and can fail over to alternative resources in microseconds. In the old analogue world of telephony, engineers talked of Five Nines–99.999% uptime. Today’s digital standards are actually at a similar level, but complemented by the resilience afforded by those instant failover options. The 20-year old leading industry body worldwide for data centre standards and certification is appropriately called the Uptime Institute.

Because in Servecentric we serve business, we are inclined to talk informally about the “-ilities” : Availability, Reliability, Stability, Predictability. In truth it could be summarised as giving organisations the Ability to make constant and 100% use of their investments in ICT.

One of the major developments in corporate ICT worldwide has developed quietly, in the sense that it is a phenomenon of the very large corporate and other organisations, government and state bodies: fewer and fewer develop their own dedicated data centres any longer. Quite simply it is almost always uneconomic for any one organisation to try to replicate the world class standards and the level of investment and expertise that the commercial data centre service providers offer today. As an industry, world class standards are simply the norm because that is what the market expects, much less demands.

Smaller organisations in Ireland and certainly around Europe have increasingly come to rely on a range of data centre services over the last decade. Simple co-location makes complete business sense for many of them. You own your own servers, set up and controlled exactly as you need them, but in the secure 24x7 supported data centre with technicians always available. Most tenants are happy to entrust the physical side of things to the facility’s team—replacement or additional hard drives, for example, or even adding a server—while the systems and software are controlled through remote management consoles. But then that is exactly how any modern organisation controls its ICT estate, so the distance between the control screen and the servers has simply become irrelevant.

Cost economics and energy saving

A lot of the talk about data centres today is about energy, for power and cooling. The cost economics are the core element, because data centres do potentially consume massive amounts of energy, so much so that national electricity generation and grids need to be planned accordingly. Dual or even multiple power sources are regarded as essential. The other factor is corporate commitment to energy saving and a green agenda, which will usually be carried over to the choice of service providers. On the other hand, data centres then pass on their economies of scale in energy usage to clients. Servecentric has been at the leading edge in smart energy management since it was established and today our tariffs are simple—units per kilowatt consumed—at very competitive rates.

In essence, the principal benefits and attributes of data centres today are generic and to a great extent commodity services. That is actually a very good thing, because it is based on world class standards, worldwide. Competition, and to some degree regulation and Best Practice, mean that the only quality of service on offer from a serious data centre is top class.

A differentiator is the addition of complementary added value services, especially for smaller organisations with limited IT expertise on staff. But specialist expertise is welcomed also by larger clients, including multinationals. For our team in Servecentric, this whole area of client service has been a key focus from the beginning. It ranges from helping to install and maintain customers’ equipment to 24x7 performance monitoring to the design and implementation of private and hybrid cloud solutions.

We also host their Web presence, e-commerce and other systems on our resources, managing all of the infrastructure and guaranteeing availability and high performance. Across the range of technology involved, we are on or ahead of the curve. The clients need only be concerned about their content and applications.

In that context, and in the Irish market especially, managed ICT services have evolved to become the mainstream resource for any organisation with natural business limits on the investment it can make directly in human and technology resources. Managed ICT is proving particularly successful in Ireland, almost everyone agrees, because it is in the nature of our small country and traditional business style to combine high standards with friendly relationships.

In a world of clouds of clouds, giant and distant public cloud providers, ever-spiralling complexity to match multiplying data traffic and storage, all conceivable solutions involve partnerships. So that’s our ambition—to be the best Irish data centre partner we can be. By adding value to our services we can help our clients add value to their businesses.