Datacentres: The temples of IT

They're greener than you think

Quocirca's Bob Tarzey surveys the datacentre market - and points out why they're better for the environment than you may think

The awesome scale of today's datacentres can only be appreciated by touring them. Their huge halls house rack upon rack of equipment and feature seemingly endless corridors, spotless cleanliness, fortress-like physical security and resilience to power failure - all managed by just a handful of employees. They will not fail to impress.

Only those prepared to invest tens of millions can afford true enterprise-class datacentres, however. In fact, many enterprises actually no longer bother, at least not for their entire datacentre requirements but instead turn to co-location providers who are investing in such infrastructure on a massive scale.

Quocirca was recently shown around Equinix's LD4 datacentre, which is located west of London and opened in October 2007.

Its attention to security is demonstrated by the fact we were not provided the location details until a confidentiality agreement had been signed. Having said that, it is not easy to keep such a large facility secret. Cruise around a few well known industrial estates and you can pick out the datacentres: large shiny buildings a couple of stories high, with few windows, no high profile company logo on show, and fearsome looking security.

Pure co-location providers offer datacentre space along with the necessary power and data connections. Their customers rent space and move their own computer equipment in.

Equinix is a global operator with 43 datacentres worldwide and a turnover not far shy of $1bn. Other co-location providers are more regional, such as Global Switch, Interxion Telecity Group and Telehouse International, which all have a strong focus on Europe.

Being able to turn to a single provider for datacentre provision across multiple regions will be attractive to some customers but is not essential. Many customers will mix and match to get the portfolio of datacentre space they require.

Within an individual provider's vast halls, the racks, cages and suites that house customers' equipment are anonymous to the visitor as part of the intense physical security that surrounds the co-location industry. However, the types of customers they serve fall into four main categories and most disclose examples of their customers in each, even if they will not show you the actual equipment they use. In fact, as infrastructure is increasingly shared, sometimes they couldn't even if they wanted to.

The first type of customer is end user organisations that have given up trying to manage all their own datacentre space. For instance, a bank may rent a whole suite, while a mid-market manufacturer's data occupies just a few racks.

The second type is independent software providers (ISV), many of whom now offer their applications as on-demand services. But both end users and ISVs are often only secondary customers of co-location providers, as they will rent full IT infrastructure from the third category, managed hosting providers (MHPs).

MHPs rent space from co-location providers, install servers, storage and networking hardware and rent the whole stack to end users and ISVs. The MHP market is growing fast and seems to be standing up well in the recession and is essential to the success of the co-location business.

Some MHPs are now getting so big that they are commissioning their own datacentres. Quocirca recently visited MHP Savvis's new datacentre and it is as impressive as any co-location facility. Another MHP, Rackspace, has also started to commission its own datacentres.

The fourth category is a hybrid: the providers of computing clouds. This includes high profile companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft and salesforce.com (the latter three can also be considered ISVs). Their goal is to provide vast amounts of compute resources on-demand to their customers.

MHPs are also now building such clouds as they increasingly provide shared infrastructure services as well as one-to-one hosting. Compute clouds can, in principle at least, span multiple locations, including a mix of datacentres owned by the cloud provider and space rented from co-location providers.

The MHP market is large and bewildering; there are the pure plays like Attenda, ELINIA, NTT Europe Online, Rackspace and Savvis. Many large system integrators offer managed hosting too but this is often as part of a broader services engagement, and confusingly some also offer co-location services but not on the same scale as the likes of Equinix, Telecity and Telehouse.

Internet service providers are in the market too, providing managed hosting as an extension of their connectivity services.

The managed hosting market is reviewed in Quocirca's recent report Managed Hosting in Europe, which is freely available on Quocirca's website.

When you visit a state of the art datacentre, on the one hand you can't fail to be impressed by the sheer scale and engineering effort. But there is a nagging feeling that these engines of the internet are an increasingly large part of the global problem of climate change.

Just one of Equinix's four uninterrupted power supply units in its LD4 facility contains banks and banks of batteries to power the datacentre for just a few minutes. Then eight large oil-powered generators cut in.

But if the power used by mankind's ever growing hunger for computing power is a problem, it is one that co-location providers help mitigate, rather than make worse. If the computer equipment from within a single co-location facility was disaggregated back into many small inefficient datacentres, the total power use would be far greater.

And if you factor in the impact IT can have on making working practices more efficient and reducing the need for business travel, it is even harder to make the environmental charge against co-location providers stick; they're temples of IT that are as much part of the solution as they are part of the problem.

A leading user-facing analyst house known for its focus on the big picture, Quocirca is made up of a team of experts in technology and its business implications. The team includes Clive Longbottom, Bob Tarzey, Rob Bamforth, Louella Fernandes, Fran Howarth and Simon Perry. Their series of columns for silicon.com seeks to demystify the latest jargon and business thinking. For a full summary of the consultancy's activities, see www.quocirca.com.