Waffle House. The poster child of the slow breakfast. The American ritual. And a Southern staple — that’s according to a recent report from QTS Realty, who was recently chosen as the breakfast guru’s colocation provider for its disaster recovery (DR) needs.
Download the full report.
The breakfast giant, popular since 1955 for its 24-hour service, operates in 25 states and more than 1,900 locations. This business model requires a “resilient” IT infrastructure, the new white paper points out.
Recently the Waffle House business turned to colocation, through provider QTS, to achieve an IT and data infrastructure need.
But the decision to build or buy in terms of data center needs is not always easy.
Waffle House operates an on-premise data center in one of its locations. When an onsite environmental issue threatened the safety of this environment, the company decided to implement a DR solution to protect its data from any future issues.
The question for Waffle House was whether to build a data center in one of its existing offices or to buy its data center needs from a colocation provider. The organization conducted an extensive review of the costs, timeline and requirements of building and managing its own data center and also spoke with colocation providers to better understand the value and expenses of an outsourced solution.
As part of this process, Waffle House consulted data services provider QTS.
“We have tremendous experience building data centers,” said Darryl Cox, Director of Sales at QTS. “Our goal was to provide them with the information that allowed them to choose the option that best aligned with their needs.”
The breakfast franchise opted to implement a DR solution in QTS’ 385,000 square foot facility in Suwanee, Ga.
“When we considered the overall value and resilience we would get with QTS, it more than made up for the minimal cost difference. QTS reduced our risk and provided a level of performance we could not have achieved on our own.” — Mike Howard, chief information officer/controller, Waffle House
The white paper breaks it down like this: Waffle House still today maintains an on-premise data center, but relies on QTS for it’s DR needs, according to the report. Outsourcing has helped build in redundancies “to ensure Waffle House can safely and effectively recover its data in the face of a disaster.”
It was also a cheaper option than building a new data center.
“Using QTS for our DR needs gives us tremendous peace of mind,” said Ian Davidson, IT Director at Waffle House. “We know our systems and data are protected in even the worst scenarios. This goes a long way in letting us focus on maintaining the quality of our business.”
Download the full report, “Data Center Services: A Story of Build Versus Buy,” courtesy of QTS, to learn more about the decisioning process to keep data services internal, or whether to use colocation provider.