Data Centers are Hot

The Internet lives in a Hotel in NYC. Nice look at a carrier hotel.

“The third party data center market is in continual growth mode,” JLL said in its 2015 report on data centers in North America. “Data centers are key economic drivers in markets within which they operate. They generate new jobs, involve significant capital investment and help strengthen the overall business environment.” [Forbes]

Switch from Vegas has been in negotiation with Michigan for tax breaks to build a data center in the state. I don’t quite understand the tax break thing. You want their tax money. Data Centers are not a bunch of jobs. And they suck electricity up — on an electric grid that is old and stretched thin. But I understand the need for the Economic Development team to have a win. ED teams count every job the same. It is antiquated thinking. Government needs to be disrupted by the Internet.

CyrusOne, a data center company majority owned by Cincinnati Bell, has opened the first phase of another data center. This phase covers “55,000 square feet, in its new 120,000 square foot facility in the Met Center just west of Austin-Bergstrom International
Airport. The building will eventually offer 18 megawatts of critical power capacity as well as 25,000 square feet of Class A office space.” [BizJournal]

Will Public Cloud eat up Enterprise Cloud? In a way yes. InfoWorld looks at the way scale defeats building your own. Amazon, Google, and others buy SO many servers – and have so much experience building mass computing environments that their costs are considerably less than what an enterprise can build it for.

“In the future, enterprises may be as unlikely to stand up their own data centers as build their own power plants…. How any cloud vendor can hope to compete with the “relentless economies of scale” of the mega-clouds. … Their variable costs decrease due to their ability to purchase in larger quantities; their fixed costs are amortized over a higher volume customer base; their relative efficiency can increase as scale drives automation and improved processes; their ability to attract and retain talent increases in proportion to the difficulty of the technical challenges imposed; and so on.” [InfoWorld]

“A typical AWS data center includes 50,000 hosts or 1,000 racks… The idea that [enterprises or even start-up cloud operators] can operate at anywhere near the cost of public cloud mega-vendors is, increasingly, crazy talk.”

Why all the data center talk? Well, I have been spending more time with my buddy COLOTRAQ CEO, Dany Bouchedid. We talk about cloud computing – IAAS, PAAS – data center infrastructure (DCI) and colocation. Colo is my favorite service to sell as an agent. Yet clients today want colo as well as public cloud access and all of that integrated into their network. The enterprise will have their own servers, AWS, Azure, Google, and Microsoft – all of that will have to be On-Net. It is that kind of network I like designing.

Tags: collocation, data center, iaas
Related tags: public cloud, center, cloud, centers, costs, enterprise