Data centre co-location - why do it?

Digital Realty's Omer Wilson explains the advantages of co-location to the audience at the Data Centre & Infrastructure Summit

Why would an organisation want to co-locate its IT infrastructure rather than keeping it in-house or moving functions to the cloud?

It's all about connectivity, Omer Wilson, marketing director EMEA of Digital Realty, one of the larger colocation providers, told the audience at Computing's Data Centre & Infrastructure Summit in London yesterday.

Data is becoming more and more important. At the same time its sheer volume, and thus requirements for its storage and transport, are ballooning. The digital universe is doubling in size every two years, Wilson said. The need to store, transport and access all this information in a timely fashion places a huge pressure on the connectivity infrastructure - which is an area prioritised by ‘colo' providers like Digital Realty.

"The reason people are collocating is the humungous amount of data traffic, the continuing upward curve of that data, and the requirement of analytics and other use of this data," Wilson said.

"It's not just about the data centre any more; it's about the connectivity."

The importance of connectivity between and within data centres is also underlined by cloud deployment, particularly the hybrid cloud set-up that is rapidly becoming the norm.

"For large corporates and financial services we're seeing public and private cloud moving closer together," Wilson said.

"Gartner says that 50 per cent of all large enterprises will have some form of hybrid cloud by 2017, and we're certainly seeing that happening."

Hybrid cloud requires connectivity between public and private cloud infrastructures and also the applications on the company's own servers. Wilson pointed to the advantages in terms of latency and resilience of having all these facilities options - public cloud, private cloud and internal servers - housed within the same building.

The top five global public cloud providers all make use of Digital Realty's data centres, as do the top three social media operators, he said.

"You get to move your facilities out of your data centre but within colo facilities like ours you have the ability to manage your own infrastructure with your own engineers. The public cloud services can also fit within our walls."

Wilson continued: "We are the nexus of the hyper-connected data economy. The latency, the ability to get to the data and share the data workloads is critical."

Digital Realty's global reach - the firm has 131 data centres across four continents - reduces operational latency by allowing the providers to get closer to their major customers, wherever they might be located.

The firm has also started to host internet and telecoms access points within its data centres, thus bringing all the connectivity requirements under one roof to further reduce latency and improve reliability.

"It's all about how the access points are speaking to each other, between our data centres and other providers as well, across Europe and also across the world."

Wilson then went on to talk about two customers and the reason why they chose co-location. The first was ARM Holdings, the chip development firm.

"ARM's key requirements were about scale of growth, high efficiency, and also the sustainability message. We've hit a PuE [power usage efficiency] of 1.15 in our Austin [Texas] data centre thanks to free air cooling and other things we have done."

The second case study was NetApp, the data storage provider.

"They were a rapidly growing business and needed a tailored colocation model. We built a tailored data centre just for them, to meet their requirements," Wilson explained.

Asked whether the company is able to dynamically migrate compute workloads from facility to facility, to take advantage of local solar or wind resources or energy price differentials, Wilson hinted that Digital Realty is looking at this but that it is something for the future. Once again though he said, when it arrives the quality of inter-data centre connectivity will be the key factor.