Data center consolidation and reduction: the inevitable trend of cloud computing in the future

Some IT experts have speculated: In an era of cloud computing and data center outsourcing, more and more businesses will no longer see the value of building and managing a data center.

"There's a lot of money spent on building a data center, and businesses need to take into account energy, power generation, UPS, racks and more, but there's no server yet," says architect Tim Antonowicz. "If you virtualize Computing resources are all needed goods, not to mention the server. "

This does not mean that private data centers will disappear, but rather that they may shrink as at least some of them outsource some of their data centers or consolidate them.

Christopher Steffen, a technology architect at Kroll Factual Data, believes that over the next five to 10 years "the footprint of the infrastructure will shrink dramatically, including their costs."

Hosted or cloud service?

Companies such as IBM and VMware encourage customers to migrate their data centers to the cloud. Meanwhile, data center management services are debating the question: is it worth building a data center now?

Cloud computing services are provided over the network. Businesses can architect private clouds, but in the last decade we've also seen the rise of public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services. Data center hosting refers to the internal hosting of data center equipment by service providers, the service providers owning and managing equipment, and then leasing them to users, who also see the actual infrastructure.

This data center experts mixed feelings. In SearchDataCenter.com's user purchasing survey, 24% of respondents said they plan to use IaaS services in the next year, or seek a custodian, up from 19% last year. And 34% of respondents said they did not use data center services last year, 36% predicted they would not use such services.

What are the benefits of data center outsourcing?

Many organizations are interested in outsourcing as a result of the recession, and according to Julius Neudorfer, CTO of North American Access Technologies, he sees a 5,000 to 10,000 square feet of data center shrinking while central organizations seek service providers to cut back on capital spending.

"When people find out that their data centers are out of date and do not have enough energy to support the expansion, they can lose ground by building new data centers and outsourcing can be timely."

Some organizations want to relocate their configured facilities, move into managed data centers and manage services for 24 hours in real time.

Kevin Armor, CTO of Paycor Inc., said: "Our business is SaaS, and although the core user is traditional as early as 8:00 to 5:00 pm, we all want to be available at any time so we have to keep it open."

Paycor's current data center is located in an office building, with a smaller room for expansion. For the next 18 months to 24 months, the company will look to a service provider for a data center with room equipment such as raised floors, multi-energy sources and multiple ISPs. Kevin Armor said that in short to meet all the necessary data center equipment.

Data center outsourcing considerations

Some organizations are less willing to deliver data centers because of their financial and health concerns.

Robert Crawford, a software engineer, said: "Customer trust is part of the signboard so we put a lot of emphasis on data security and we control who gets into the room and only changes when we need to change the environment."

IT experts also worry about bandwidth and network reliability. Robert Rosen, CTO of a government department, said: "We found some applications and the cost of buying bandwidth to go beyond the cost of building a data center was a big problem, especially with big data."

Outsourcing can impact performance for companies that are not near the data center host. "We are remote here, connecting to service providers requires long distance connections, and in fact we do not intend to relocate to a distant data center at any time," said a medical institution systems analyst.

Data center dilemma

In many cases, the company will rectify private data centers to maintain control, reduce consumption and outsource some of them.

Kent Altena, a technology engineer, expects to migrate 5% to 10% of his data center footprint to the cloud two years from now, accounting for 30% to 50% in three to five years. He said: "I think private data centers will not be hours, but not as large as it is now."

An IT manager recently consolidated the data center to consolidate two large equipment rooms into two columns. For their companies, consolidation is pressing, or data center upgrades can cost more than just cloud computing. He said: "If you do not, you can only put your business on the cloud."