Data Centers – Part 3 – Pooled Infrastructure

One of the hot new growth areas in data centers is what I call “pooled infrastructure”.  The data center is a pool of interchangeable servers that can be rented out on a moment’s notice.  For example, a customer can rent out 30 servers during peak usage and 10 servers during off-peak usage.  Allowing customers to share a pool of servers greatly increases hardware utilization.

Along with the push towards renting out server capacity, the infrastructure providers are bundling value-added software with their infrastructure to save time administering and setting up the infrastructure.

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Data centers – Part 2 – Centralized management

With traditional colocation, a data center will rent out space to many different customers.  Each customer brings in their own server hardware.  One of the trends among data centers is to have the data center purchase and manage all of the hardware.  This creates various economies of scale and benefits such as:

1. Standardization of hardware within a data center allows for elasticity and rapid provisioning of a server.  This opens up a new market for customers who want to rent servers.  Customers can have an operating serving within minutes or hours rather than weeks.
2. Software can automate the process of setting up servers.
3. Centralizing the purchasing and management of hardware reduces the inventory of spare parts that must be kept on site.  It also allows for repairs to have a much faster turnaround time because clients do not need to physically go to the data center to repair their servers.  These are very minor efficiencies.
4. If clients do not need to actually visit their servers, certain efficiencies are possible.  Vertical integration between data center design and server design allows for various capex and opex savings from power efficiency and cheaper servers.
5. Some infrastructure providers offer managed IT services.  They help customers to secure their servers, to maintain the server’s software, etc. etc.