Density - The Data Center Service Providers Dirty Secret:

Thursday, October 15, 2009

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Take a thorough look at the marketing and sales hype from the competitors. Generally, they tout the incredible security and redundancy of their facilities. Let's face it, in today’s environment any good data center has biometrics, man-traps, fire suppression, and redundant power of some kind; if they don't you should probably be looking elsewhere. The one thing they don't talk about is their power density. If any mention is made, it is obfuscated by expressing it as watts per square foot. Density isn't discussed because density is their greatest weakness. Assuming every data center is on par with respect to security and redundancy the single most critical factor in choosing a data center is density.

What is density?

Density is simply the amount of electricity that your equipment requires. Density is often expressed as watts or as kW. The amount of cooling your servers require is directly related to how much power they utilize and therein lays the problem.

How is density a problem?

It's generally assumed that because a data center is a purpose-built facility with extreme amounts of power and cooling capacity, customers can install anything in a rack, turn it on and can continue to do so until the rack is full. While a marketing “glossy” may lead you to believe that is the case, it is not! There are a number of factors which hinder your ability to fully utilize your cabinets.

First, when you deal in the huge amounts of electricity that data center service providers require, it's not a trivial matter to simply add more power. Most centers have a finite amount of power available to them. In most instances, data center service providers take that amount of power, divide it by the amount of floor space and that becomes their business model -- run out of power when you run out of cabinets even if your customers can't fully utilize them. Second, you have the limits of physics; even in the most current hot aisle / cold aisle configured facilities, there is only so much cool air you can deliver to the cabinets to cool the equipment.

In short this translates into the fundamental problem that in most facilities you will not be able to fully utilize your cabinets. While this may not be a problem immediately, it is likely that your business will grow or you will upgrade your equipment. Then, it will surely become a problem. The best, but the most unlikely scenario is that you can purchase an additional cabinet next to your existing one. More likely, you'll end up with another cabinet elsewhere in the data center requiring expensive cross-connects. The worst case scenario is that when you’re ready to expand, the data center is full and you have to hold off on your expansion until more space becomes available or you find a new facility with all of the inherent costs of moving and transition that such a scenario entails.

Customers tend to underestimate the costs associated with those problems. Let's take a standard 42u cabinet at approximately $1000 monthly; that works out to roughly $24 monthly per rack unit. If we can only populate that rack half way because of our density issue, our real cost per rack unit just jumped to $48. Now when we add a second cabinet, we have to incur additional setup fees, cross connect fees, structured cabling costs and most likely, the purchase of additional switch gear. This illustration takes power costs out of the equation but in general your cost per amp is much higher than it appears to be at first glance.

How is Net Access different?

Net Access builds high-density data centers which allow you to be seven times more dense than our competition. That means you can go from one sparsely populated blade center per cabinet to four fully populated blade centers. Best of all we do it in one cabinet for around the same price of a standard cabinet elsewhere. As your density increases your price per unit is half the cost of other providers. We invite you to come and see in person the Net Access difference.