Given the mission criticality of IT infrastructure to your business, choosing a data center can be the best or worst decision you could ever make.

The Business Case: We find many customer RFPs address only the space requirements for hosting their current environment with a couple of racks reserved for expansion. Often these short-sighted RFPs lead to customers making short-sighted decisions because they don't adequately plan for the most important thing which is their future power requirements. The fact is servers are getting more powerful and power hungry and you will eclipse your data centers per cabinet power limit if not now, in the very near future. Many customers assume that a cabinet is 42 rack units and that you can use all of them; in most data centers that is simply not the case. The reason for this is because the amount of power you are allowed to install in your cabinet is less than you will require to power a full cabinet of todays equipment. Data center operators try and hide that fact by talking about watts per square foot, but the real question you need to ask is how many kW or amps can I put in each cabinet?

It's not uncommon to find a moderately loaded server using 3 Amps of power. If your data center is capable of only the industry average of 4kW (per cabinet [38 amps]) then only 12 servers can be placed in that cabinet leaving it almost 75% empty and unusable. Even if you look at a "modern" data center with a higher limit of 6 kW (50 amps) you can only fit 18 servers which leaves almost 60% of the cabinet unusable. Those illustrations are with today's loads, what happens in 3 years from now when that hardware comes off-lease or end of life and you decide to undergo a hardware refresh? You can bet that in 3 years a server will still require the same amount of power, or perhaps more, but will be capable of even higher compute loads. This means you'll be able to fit even less equipment in that same cabinet. So how do you future proof your IT environment to protect your investment and prevent you from having to move your entire environment every few years? The answer is simple- look for a data center that is capable of hosting tomorrow's compute loads today. More importantly High-Density colocation can be 50% of the price of those low density data centers.

Let's assume we have the same server from the illustration above and factor in some colocation fees. For illustration purposes let's also assume we have 20 typical 2u servers which fully utilize a single cabinet. 20 servers each using 3 Amps of 110 volt power is 63 Amps or just under 7 kW of power. If we were in a data center which had a limit of 4 kW per cabinet and charged $1000 per month per cabinet, we would need to buy 2 cabinets for a total of $2000 monthly. At Net Access we would require one high-density cabinet costing $1500 monthly; resulting in monthly savings of $500.

If we change the illustration to 25 1u servers still drawing 3 amps of 110 volt power, we would require 75 Amps or about 9 kW of power. In the same data center with the 4 kW limitation we would end up with 3 racks for a monthly cost of $3000. If those same 25 servers were hosted at Net Access they would require just 1 high-density cabinet costing $1500 monthly. As compared to the competition this environment would be 50% cheaper when hosted at Net Access and our cabinet still has room for 17 more servers.

The more dense you make your environment, the larger that gap becomes. More importantly though, you've helped to future proof your environment. When it's time for an equipment refresh or you need more space for equipment you can simply remove older, larger, servers and replace them with newer, smaller, equipment negating the need to purchase additional cabinets.

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