At ARG, we have seen an explosion in interest in data center services since the beginning of this year. ARG has helped more clients get into data centers than ever before and the inquiries continue to increase. We have asked our clients why this migration is happening now – what has changed over the years to lead them to seek out a data center. Here are some of the common responses.
1) Availability – Service levels to end-users are increasing. Data is becoming more and more valuable. As IT groups require users to save work on centralized infrastructure, the IT organization is increasingly under the gun to ensure maximum availability. In the past, if a single user had a work station issue, the impact was isolated. Now, if the IT group has a storage array issue, the entire organization is impacted. High availability is driving data center utilization.
2) Cost of Infrastructure – This is a classic make versus buy analysis. If an organization needs to grow its infrastructure beyond its current environment or is moving to a new facility, capital must be used to build-out the appropriate environmentals. When they do the math, many companies find that buying infrastructure through a data center is much more cost effective.
3) Cost of Connectivity – Data center connectivity is cheap. No other way to say it. When clients are situated in a carrier neutral facility, their cost of bandwidth is a fraction of what they would normally pay on the outside. Clients are putting their high bandwidth applications in data centers to lower to total costs. The savings realized can be spent on redundant connectivity to fully bullet-proof the services.
4) Remote Management – The days of having to “get on” a machine to make changes are over. System Admins are usually sitting at their work stations performing maintenance and updating applications on servers at some other location. Whether the server is down the hall in a server room or across town in a data center is irrelevant. Proximity to the infrastructure is no longer a day to day consideration.
Many other issues are also important, such as clean uninterrupted power, security, expansion opportunities, etc. If you are considering the state of your infrastructure and think that a data center might be worth thinking about, give us a call. ARG represents virtually every data center in the market and can help you determine if there is an appropriate fit for your needs.
