The data center has become the home of all new digital content, cloud services, and a number of new kinds of industry disrupting organizations. As more companies find benefits around cloud and data center services; investment in the data center market will continue to grow. Global spending on IaaS is expected to reach almost $16.5 billion in 2015, an increase of 32.8 percent from 2014, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2014 to 2019 forecast at 29.1 percent, according to Gartner’s latest forecast. Furthermore, Gartner points out that, in 2014, the absolute growth of public cloud IaaS workloads surpassed the growth of on-premises workloads (of any type) for the first time. Gartner’s 2015 CIO survey indicates that 83 percent of CIOs consider cloud IaaS as an infrastructure option, and 10 percent are already cloud-first with cloud IaaS as their default infrastructure choice.
The latest AFCOM State of the Data Center survey indicated that not only spend was increasing; but density as well.
- 70% of respondents indicated that power density (per rack) has increased over the past 3 years.
- 26% indicated that this increase was significant.
So how do you overcome these new requirements around space and density? Most colocation providers follow any one of the two delivery models for providing infrastructure to wholesale customers: shared or dedicated data centers. In a shared model, the customer is allocated a portion of the total infrastructure of the facility. Shared facilities are typically provided for customers who demand less than 1 MW of power, but are still interested in a wholesale relationship. Shared colocation providers often oversubscribe their infrastructure, counting on multiple customers not peaking their usage at the same time. Because of oversubscription, shared facilities can be less expensive than dedicated, but the wholesale customer can be at risk from the bad behavior of other tenants in the facility.
In a dedicated data center delivery model, the customer is allocated a fixed infrastructure that is isolated from other customers. Dedicated infrastructure typically cannot scale beyond the initial allocation. And while dedicated infrastructure isolates one customer from another, it usually comes at a higher price due to capacity management challenges and often leads to lower availability due to the small number of fault domains.
With this in mind, it’s even more critical to understand the differences between shared and dedicated data center environments. And, most of all – where they fit in with your business. In this whitepaper from RagingWire, you’ll learn the key differences between a dedicated model and one that delivers distributed redundancy as a direct enhancement of shared and dedicated infrastructure models. In working with the right kind of colocation model, the following points from the paper help make the decision a lot more clear:
- Shared Power Delivery Infrastructure
- Dedicated Power Delivery Infrastructure
- Distributed Redundancy Power Delivery Infrastructure
- Maintenance Scenarios – Shared, Dedicated and Distributed
- Electrical Distribution Protection for Wholesale Customers
- Isolation of UDP Pair Circuits for Wholesale Customers
- Distributed Redundancy and UDP Pair Distribution
Download this whitepaper today to understand the overall colocation delivery model; and where shared vs dedicated data center environments make sense for your business.