Episodes
Wednesday Dec 12, 2018
Episode 11 - Data Center Downsizing
Wednesday Dec 12, 2018
Wednesday Dec 12, 2018
For today’s episode we’re talking about a topic that has come up a number of times since our data center call-in show. The question is: “What do I do with my overbuilt data center?”
So what happened, what has happened over and over again, is that companies in the nineties and aughts started to move into an all-digital strategy and at the time they thought that the only way to do that was to build their own data centers. Now, when you build a data center you tend to build it with some room to grow, like, I have 200kW of IT equipment today but who knows, ten years from now I might have 500kW and I don’t want to have to build another data center. So what companies did was they built the data center to accommodate that 500kW. And for a while that made sense, especially in the nineties. At that time colocation, that is putting equipment in a shared facility like equinix or digital realty, colocation wasn’t very popular with a lot of companies. It was much more expensive than it is today and a lot of IT managers and CIOs saw that they would save money by housing their data centers at their own facilities.
Now technology got bigger and bigger in the nineties and into the aughts, culminating somewhere around 2008 or 2010 with these large enterprise data centers that held big hunking SANs and acres of servers. But by then virtualization, storage consolidation and cloud storage had all begun to infiltrate. After that moment, data centers, almost in unison, began to shrink, to pull into themselves and get smaller and smaller.
So what we had was, instead of 200kW growing into 500kW, we had 200kW shrinking into 150kW. So you had data centers served by infrastructure designed for over three times the current load. And in reality since then there has been even more consolidation and more companies saying to themselves, “I don’t want to be in the data center business anymore.”
Well, on today’s show we are going to investigate that very phenomenon. We are going to look at why data centers shrank and what companies are doing with that extra space, power and cooling. Also, we’re going to look at what to do in the future to avoid being stuck with the bill for that entire data center that you’re not actually using.
Our sponsor this week is Green Lane Design. Green Lane has been designing, engineering and building critial facilities for over ten years including major enterprise customers as well as colocation facilities. GLD has designed and developed an integrated stack of design disciplines. If you would be interested in a free assessment go to http://www.greenlanedesign.com/contact/ and mention the podcast.
Our music is algorithmically generated by Jukedeck. Create your own at http://jukedeck.com. Try it out. It's free.
We pulled a clip from SP Homerun for our little newsflash. You can find SP Homerun at http://www.sphomerun.com/data-center-sales-and-marketing-blog/why-data-center-liquidations-spread-far-and-wide
We also licensed the newsflash music from jobro. You can find the song here: https://freesound.org/people/jobro/sounds/88022/
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