The data center operator that starts with a strategic approach: yours

7 April 2021 | 999 Shares

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It’s standard fare for IT departments to have multiple systems (up to and including production applications & services) hosted on public clouds. Some issues may cause headaches, like retaining strict platform agnosticism and the costs of getting data out of one cloud to place it elsewhere. But in general, the willingness to continue to pay the monthly bills from AWS/GCP/Azure et al. often comes down to questions of cost, reliability, latency, and bandwidth.

But if the rising numbers of instances of public cloud have brought one thing, it’s a re-focus onto IT CAPEX & OPEX costs. This reappraisal is making many CTOs question how and where their IT function should live.

The operational demands of running data centers can easily consume individuals’ and a team’s resources without dramatically increasing the enterprise’s net gains from such facilities. In part, that’s what gives public cloud offerings an advantage, albeit one that can come with a considerable price tag for the unwary.

As more powerful systems become available, either as part of public cloud platforms or for procurement in-house, there’s always the need for constant reappraisal. Refreshing existing DCs or building new ones takes significant commitment. There’s always the balance to be found between pre-empting future needs, the timescales involved before owned facilities come online, and public cloud costs.

The balancing point may be found among technical issues and financial spreadsheets, but for the rest of the C-suite, decisions are often a question of cost and practicality. In short, the business needs to achieve X in timescale Y, at a total cost of Z.

Therefore, businesses are sometimes being weaned away from their own data centers, but not always in favor of the public cloud services. The increasingly viable alternative is using colocation in third-party data centers for some degree of provision, which offer options to the enterprise that are operationally superior but at lower risk and cost than an on-premise solution. Aspects of the public cloud providers, like on-demand scalability, access to different carriers, and uptime metrics, are also available from third-party DCs.

At Tech HQ, we’ve been highlighting several DC providers, ranging from smaller-scale outfits specializing in lightweight edge setups through overseas organizations that offer zero-carbon offshore data services. In the spotlight here is H5 Data Centers, which is a privately-owned company offering over two million square feet of facilities in 13 US locations.

The company’s size (and therefore considerable ability to leverage economies of scale) means it offers better connectivity and lower power cost per processor cycle than any legacy DC. Its focus is on its clients’ operational needs for interconnectivity and data center services, not providing its customers the type of infrastructure that public cloud providers create, seemingly to lock in users.

This non-opaque approach to providing for strategic requirements begins with the initial inquiry, and the flexibility and scalability of offerings are maintained throughout the relationship. Customers know they can scale back or massively increase capacity according to the business’s wider needs, not according to physical constraints or internal IT operational issues.

The wholesale nature of H5 Data Centers’ provision means that the company will never end up competing with its clients. Instead, it concentrates on providing facilities suited to mission-critical infrastructure and compliance. It invests constantly in energy efficiency, developing mechanical, cooling, electrical, and failover systems, and securing connectivity and peering agreements. The thirteen DCs nationwide mean you can increase your geographic points-of-presence or keep it local as you see fit.

To speak to the specialists who eat, sleep and breathe data centers, and speak your business’s language, get in touch with the company. Its enviable up-time metrics are just the start of the figures a CIO and all enterprise decision-makers will find convincing.