Mission possible: Reducing your data centre TCO

The pace of change is increasing, and this acceleration is making its impact felt on traditional industry niches and incumbent players. To succeed and stay competitive, enterprises must articulate a cohesive and organisation-wide digital transformation strategy to increase their flexibility and speed-to-market.

One linchpin of digital transformation lies with technology, and the ability to establish a secure and flexible digital foundation that can be harnessed towards the development of new services and effectively support existing ones. The result is heightened demand for new digital infrastructure either to meet increased computing requirements, or to overhaul outdated systems with their rigid and inelastic capabilities.

Unsurprisingly, private cloud deployments are popular for their ability to deliver cloud-like flexibility while offering the control and security that only self-managed infrastructure possesses. Moreover, many enterprises recognise that rationalising infrastructure costs using the operational expenditure (OPEX) model of a public cloud is a short-term gain that will eventually be eclipsed by mounting workloads.

Yet for all its advantages, an on-premises or private cloud deployment must be properly planned and designed with future growth firmly in mind; attempting to do this hastily may result in overprovisioning or underestimating future space or power requirements. And while the basics of shopping for a colocation partner is well understood by CIOs and senior executives, there are various considerations that can impact the bottomline where the total cost of ownership (TCO) is concerned.

A common mistake when it comes to choosing a colocation provider is for enterprises to peg their decision solely on pricing metrics such as cost per rack. While not unimportant, unscrupulous new players have been known to deliberately undercut market rates, relying on the cost and difficulty of a data centre migration to substantially increase prices once the initial lease ends.

This means that a price-comparison approach without a proper consideration of the entire value proposition can result in a significantly higher TCO once the dust settles. One strategy to guard against steep price increases is to negotiate longer terms and insist on detailed rate charts ahead of signing on the dotted line, though this does not prevent price gouging on new requirements that fall outside of contracted terms.

Another more insidious consideration that can impact the TCO are requirements that were not originally envisioned by the enterprise. A prime example would be power density, which has increased dramatically with the introduction of modern hyper-converged hardware in recent years. While they can result in an energy draw of two or even three times that of traditional servers per rack, they deliver the kind of computing density and storage that is favoured for private cloud deployments.

However, an older data centre may not have the cooling capacity to support the latest generation of hyper-converged hardware. Even when colocation providers agree to them, installing them within an older facility may be a costly proposition due to substantially higher charges brought about by a low data centre power density or the need to set up specialist cooling equipment.

The cost of network connectivity is another factor that sometimes gets overlooked. Though colocation facilities typically have no shortage of connectivity, the cost can differ widely depending on the network providers with points of presence (PoP) within a facility. Some data centres may also have prebuilt fibre optic connectivity between other key facilities in the city, allowing for significantly faster provisioning times to backup data centres.

Finally, the advancements in IoT means that organisations now can keep a close eye on their infrastructure. The availability of detailed statistics such as electrical loading and environmental temperature from the colocation provider can facilitate forward-looking capacity management, or influence changes to how workloads are distributed for better energy efficiency. As the type of sensors and granularity of data increases, it can also allow a rethink across how capacity is managed across all layers of the IT stack.

Finally, there is no question that security matters, too. The indisputable rise in terrorism and covert cyber attacks means that is more important than ever for enterprises to protect their digital infrastructure against attempts to damage physical access to them. While theft of servers is not new, the recent burglary of 600 valuable crypto-mining servers in Icelandic data centres underscores the importance of robust security measures in data centres.

You can learn more about Singtel data centres and their security measures including round-the-clock surveillance and armed guards here.