Is the Data Center Market the new dot-com bubble?

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The last years the Data Center Market is growing real fast. The average growth between 2008-2012 is reaching the 25% and many players, not only vendors but also Colocations, were appeared in the specific segment.

But which were the main key drivers of this market?

Of course:

- The increased demand for Data Sharing , due to Tablets and Mobiles

- The increase demand for Data Storage

- The increased demand of IP traffic

But , is the market similar to the dot-com bubble, when the Internet companies suddenly collapsed although the indications were showing growth?

Indeed, the Data Center Market is based on the increased demand of the above mentioned drivers. Specifically, in the today Financial Times, Cisco reports that the Internet traffic will quadruple within the next 4 years. The demand is there, but what about the supply? The supply is growing approximately 10%  per year. So, the danger is that one day the supply cannot support the existing demand.

But, what will happen when the key drivers arrive to a saturation? Is it any point where the market will collapse as the dot-com?

Of course, as the majority of the markets, the Data Center Market will arrive to the Maturity Stage on which it should reposition itself. This stage is not so close and it may take years as people and enterprises are operating in high ”processing” speeds and the demand for Data exchange is incrementally increasing.

Nevertheless, the Data Centers Market should continuously monitor the key drivers in order to avoid a similar mass destruction, like the one happened with the dot-com bubble.

IX Reach adds new London data centre LDeX to its expansive network

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IX Reach, a layer 2 Ethernet carrier, is pleased to have become a partner of LDeX and added LDeX1 – a state of the art, network independent 22,000sq ft London data centre – to its PoP (Point of Presence) list and is able to offer their full range of services; capacity from 100Mbps to multiple 10Gbps over Point-to-Point/Multipoint connection, full colocation options and also a Direct Connect into the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud platform.

By using rack space in the Greater London area data centre, LDeX1, in conjunction with IX Reach, customers will benefit from being situated in a highly secure and cutting edge colocation facility, taking advantage of short route connectivity to the main London city sites and connect on to IX Reach’s expansive international footprint in the same manner as from any other site but without the inner London price.

Steve Wilcox, Founder and CTO of IX Reach, commented regarding the recent addition: “It’s great to see a new independent data centre opening up in a popular city such as London; it’s important for customers to have choice and variety as to where they have their presence. For companies wanting to keep costs down but still have an excellent connection to the more central data centres and Internet Exchanges, LDeX is the perfect solution.”

IX Reach’s broad and far-reaching network footprint includes key cities across Europe and North America and within its International and Metro connectivity portfolio, IX Reach also offers Remote Peering enabling customers to connect to all of the major Internet Exchanges including; LINX, AMS-IX, DE-CIX, France IX, Netnod, and MIX.

Matt Edgley, Sales Director at London Data Exchange, commented: “We have a responsibility at LDeX to attract the best providers to the facility and through this partnership with IX Reach we’ve maintained this commitment.  There is nowhere our clients cannot reach with their data and providers, ISPs and carriers ensuring a tailor made solution delivered over a robust and reliable network.

Whatever your network needs, IX Reach is a one stop shop solutions provider who include each required element to an exact specification to improve businesses such as large corporates, content providers, ISPs and carriers ensuring a tailor made solution delivered over a robust and reliable network.

For more information about services and partnerships please email enquiries@ixreach.com, call +44 845 013 0845, or like us on facebook.com/IXReach or follow us on twitter.com/IXReach.

6 Reasons to move your Data Center in a Colocation

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Based on the last discussions, the majority of the enterprises are moving their IT Resources to a Colocation. But what are the principal reasons for moving your Servers, Storage and Network Equipment to an external area?

- Old Data Centers cannot support new Business Demands. Most of the existing Data Centers are using old technology, eg. Low Density Racks, which cannot drive the new Business Demands , like Servers’ Virtualization and Consolidation.

- Improved Service Levels. Who does not want a 24/7/365 Service? Who does not want an immediate response to any demand? Actually, in the existing installations, the Data Centers are supported from the IT Department, however, only on 5×8 basis and on a very limited coverage.

-  Increased Availability. A modern Colocation can offer a Tier IV availability level. If an enterprise decided to reach this level, then the costs are consequently high and the ROI quite long.

-  Scaling and Adding Capacity. A Colocation can easily provide space and spare capacity to expand.

-  Reduced Energy Consumption. The modern Colocations utilize State of the Art Economizers and Green Technologies which significantly reduce the Energy Consumption. Conversely, an Enterprise Data Center consumes much more Energy as the Economies of Scale does not allow a mass Energy reduction.

-  Environment. Everybody wants a better future for our planet. Why do not move our IT Resources to a Colocation from which we could reduce our carbon footprint?

 

5 Under 25, Celebrating International Youth Day

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Ah youth, let me count the ways in which I love you! The world challenges us from every direction during early adulthood. The significance of such a fact shall not be overlooked, though it often is and usually dismissed by our elders. Today and in the past young people have been faced with adversity. Our world’s youth has typically been marginalized from decision making processes, faced high levels of unemployment and poor working conditions.

This is why the UN recognizes August 12th as “International Youth Day”. A holiday dedicated to “Building a Better World: Partnering with Youth,” if only to encourage a generation to follow their hears and make good on a dream. In celebration of this glorious event we would like to give a shout out to the young entrepreneurs of the world and say, keep up the good work, keep fighting for a brighter future and thank you for inspiring us. Being young and idealistic has it’s advantages; just in case you happen to be a young person thinking of starting a business, check out latest article below and get inspired. Perhaps you will be the next Mark Zuckerburg.

http://www.colocationamerica.com/blog/5-under-25-International-Youth-Day.htm

A Current Affair: Data Center Power Options

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What would you do if the next time you drove your car, you noticed a small amount of fuel leaking from it?  What if all cars on the road had similar leaks?

Data Centers these days all have the equivalent of pinhole leaks in their gas tanks.  It’s a largely inescapable bit of inefficiency that comes with major electrical systems:  a portion of energy is lost during its delivery……

http://blogs.cisco.com/ciscoit/a-current-affair-data-center-power-options/

Digital Britain vs. Digital Europe, a nice research from Interxion

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Following on from their work on this cloud computing survey a few months ago, Interxion have carried out some more research into how Britain uses the internet compared to the rest of Europe.  They have published the results in the form of an infographic here which visualises the results nicely.

Some of the key interesting points are that despite British consumers leading the way in terms of buying online, British businesses are lagging behind the rest of Europe in terms of selling their services online.

Another surprising statistic is the growth of British broadband which has made big strides forward in terms of the overall speed of connections.  It has been a target for the UK government to move towards faster internet for everyone and private companies such as Virgin Media are putting big resources into speeding up their network.

Interxion Cloud Survey 2011

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You may have seen our blog post last year from Interxion on What the Cloud Looks Like which gave us a peek into their London data centre.  They have also carried out a survey amongst European businesses to find out what their opinions and intentions are in relation to cloud computing.

The Interxion Cloud Insight Survey results are visualised in the graphic below.  With cloud being such a hot topic right now, it is interesting to get some insight into what businesses really think about it.  We all hear lots about the benefits of the cloud, but how much do businesses actually care and what are they planning to do about it?

Interestingly, quite a few of the large businesses surveyed (71%) did see cloud as a priority.  The figure was slightly lower for medium and small businesses, 67% and 68% respectively.  The survey also showed that the main security concern was preventing data loss, which can obviously be understood.

In terms of commonly used applications, email, calendars, backup and recovery were listed amongst the most popular.  Given the growth of mobile applications and syncing across multiple devices, this isn’t really surprising as email and calendars are often needed on the move.

Take a look at the rest of the results and feel free to comment and let us know what you think of the results.

What Does the Cloud Look Like?

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What Does the Cloud Look Like?

Ever wondered what “the cloud” really looks like?  It can conjure up all sorts of images, but now Interxion, a European provider of data centre services, have released a gallery of photos which give us a peak inside their facilities.

Security

Normally, these images are behind levels of security that rivals some of the world’s most secure buildings.  We can’t reveal all security measures, but they include things such as 24/7 security guards, biometric scanning and advanced CCTV equipment.  Probably most  interesting of all though are the mantraps that will greet you as you enter an Interxion data centre:

The images released by Interxion demonstrate various aspects of the infrastructure of a high-availability data centre.  These aspects include security which we have already shown above, as well as cooling, power and connectivity.  Below we have shown some images from Interxion on each of these aspects.

Cooling

Here we have cooling fans on the roof of the Interxion data centre in the heart of London.

Note the proximity to the City of London and the financial district.  This close proximity means a much faster service for Interxion’s finance customers, these customers are doing financial trading where a split second delay can make the difference between a profit and a loss.

In comparison, the next image shows the cooling units on the roof of the Interxion facility in the Netherlands:

 

With the amount of power and heat generated by the data centre, cooling is a vital part of the successful running of the centre.  Without it, the countless pieces of equipment inside the data centre would simply overheat.

Power

It goes without saying, power is incredibly  important to a data centre.  The amount of power required to run a data centre is hard to comprehend.  The importance of power can be demonstrated by just looking at the backup resources which are put in place. Here is an image of a typical backup diesel generator:

Connectivity

As with power, connectivity is paramount to a data centre, whether it be external connectivity provided by the carrier community or internal cross connects between  customers within the data centre .

The combination of these four aspects allow Interxion to provide data centre services across a range of Hubs including financial, digital media, gaming and cloud.


PUE, CUE and then what is next? SUE maybe?

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The PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) is a fundamental and traditional metric for calculating how much additional power a Data Center needs, to effectively operate the IT equipment. The greater the figure the higher is the energy consumption. A similar metric is the CUE (Carbon Usage Effectiveness), as it calculates how much carbon is emitted from the Servers and the peripherals. Again, the higher the metric the higher impact to the environment. Furthermore, as the new regulation for Carbon emissions arrives, then it will be very difficult to emit more than it is allowed.

But these metrics start and arrive to the same point, which is the electrical energy and efficiency. If you decide to adopt a Green Strategy, then your task is very easy, as you invest much money and your systems have a smaller energy consumption, thus lower power and carbons emissions. It is like the energy bulbs we select in our home, we invest on a double valued appliance to benefit long term from the lower consumption. in this case, although we reduced the energy consumption, we did not reduce the room’s space.

In IT Infrastructure, the power consumption is critical but the space usage effectiveness is also very important, as many operators calculate the spaces’ costs, since they are not the same all over the world. How much it costs a square meter in London? And, how much in Dublin? And how many Servers can we deploy with High Density Racks and Virtualization and how many with Low Density Racks and without Virtualization?

In this sense, prior to any investment we should calculate not only the PUE or CUE but also the SUE, Space Usage Effectiveness as it will signify how many IT resources we could deploy in a significant area. It is like the home’s bulbs example, similarly you can exchange the chiller or a legendary UPS with a free cooling type or a Modular Type High Efficiency UPS, you can Virtualize your servers and reduce the consumption but you cannot minimise or extend you White Space area.