News & events
Time to go private?
Mark Ryder, Director of enterprise at fibre network provider Geo, looks at how data centres are looking at future proofing their networks with dedicated fibre solutions.
The recession may have affected all industries, but not all that impact has been negative. Data centre providers have performed very strongly over the recent months. As the recession deepened, organisations of all sizes looked to take advantage of the cost savings they could make by outsourcing their data centre operations. The green agenda has also spurred businesses to use data centres in order to improve the environmental footprint, something that the upcoming Carbon Reduction Commitment, which will actively measure carbon emissions across a variety of organisations, will further enforce.
The reasons why organisations use data centres differs from business to business. It may be simply a case of office space; hosting your own servers can take up a vast amount of physical space as well as cause a surge in energy bills. Certain organisations look to place their data offsite as part of a disaster recovery initiative, this is especially true for banks or organisations storing business critical information. Of course, it may be that it is just simply more cost effective and time efficient to let a data centre provider take care of day to day data storage needs. Whatever the reason, the increase in co-location means more data centre usage and means that the supporting network structure is being put under increasing pressure.
As a result, large organisations are increasingly looking to support their growing bandwidth needs with their own dedicated fibre network that directly links their offices to their data centres. In turn, data centre providers themselves are finding it far more effective to have access to dedicated fibre networks linking the data centres they own or manage within cities or even nationwide.
So why is there such a surge in ‘private’ dedicated networks rather than the standard shared network infrastructure? Commercial flexibility seems to be a key driver. There are significant long term cost savings to be made by having a dedicated network. At first glance a standard managed service network is seemingly cheaper. There is no upfront lump sum and organisations just pay a monthly fee. However in the long term, as requirement for bandwidth goes up, which with data centres this is always the case, costs start climbing.
The majority of data heavy organisations will have growing bandwidth needs. In fact, recent research from Geo shows that almost 90 percent of IT directors surveyed were committed to upping their bandwidth in 2010. More than half (54 percent) of IT decision makers are preparing to grow bandwidth by between 20 and 50 percent. A further 10 percent expect their requirements to rise by more than 50 percent in the next twelve months.
If these organisations are on a shared managed serviced network they will be expected to fork out significantly increased fees each month from the moment the bandwidth is increased. Dedicated network owners don’t suffer from this, they pay a much smaller fee to upgrade their network and that is it, the bandwidth is increased and no further costs are incurred. If organisations on a shared network are looking to make year on year increases in bandwidth, they could be in for hefty monthly bills.
Pressure on the public internet
As this hunger for bandwidth increases, so does the congestion over shared networks. Public and shared networks are slowing down and organisations dependent on fast data, such as financial institutions trading on the stock market, are growing increasingly concerned about the finite resources of the public internet. Dedicated networks effectively eliminate the shared traffic, furnishing organisations with a network of data centres and business sites with the necessary bandwidth and data speeds they need to work effectively.
Data centre providers using dedicated networks are essentially future-proofing their data speed aspirations and bandwidth needs. Upgrades, in the form of Coarse and Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing, give dedicated network owners the ability to access bandwidth of around 1Tbit per second from a single fibre pair. With upgrade scope of this size, dedicated network owners could be getting themselves well ahead of the game as public networks and shared internet services slow down to a crawl under the weight of social networking, music streaming and IPTV.
Right to privacy
It is not just bandwidth which is spurring on the interest in dedicated networks. One area that keeps data centre managers and IT administrators awake at night is downtime and network vulnerability. Global business never sleeps, any revenue loss or service downtime, as a result of network complications, not only has an impact on the bottom line but can seriously affect a business’s reputation. Outages occur for a variety of reasons; most commonly by random upgrades to the public network or utility repairs that have caused disruption.
Consequently, organisations with sizable network requirements are finding that investment into a dedicated network is a sure fire way of reducing network downtime whilst simultaneously improving IT administrator’s sleep patterns. Geo’s own network in London actually runs through the city’s sewer systems and alongside gas pipelines in the rest of the UK, far away from the maintenance prone surface, which further protects the physical infrastructure of the networks.
This is especially important for organisations whose sites are located through some of the busiest business districts in the world. In order to facilitate the needs of organisations such as this, Geo has extended its London data centre footprint, for example with datacentre companies like Equinix. This results in increased scalability and power access for our customers as well as improved reliability for the entire network.
Virtual security
Besides physical damage, another key factor that is prompting businesses, to switch to dedicated networks is virtual security. Companies and data centres are sharing highly sensitive data between their sites. The risk of having this data intercepted by a malicious digital attack is significantly reduced if there is no one else sharing your network. A dedicated network is inherently more secure because it is more controllable than shared assets, and the organisation owning it can choose to apply its own security protocols.
So why are not all data centre providers and other businesses switching to a dedicated network? Well, there is usually a large initial investment which, during economic turbulence, may make some organisations hesitant to take up their own network. This is understandable; however, CIOs and subsequently CFOs are coming around to the idea that future-proofing networks with a dedicated solution now will mean predictable cost savings in the long run.
Property portfolio costs are one way in which dedicated networks are helping organisations to reduce costs. Indeed, data centre providers are always on the look out for the best location for their advanced sites. BlueSquare Data, the ISO 9001 certified data centre provider, found a perfect location for its new tier 4 data centre, situated just outside the M25. It chose to link the new facility to its other data centre sites via a dedicated network.
Matthew Munson, Technical Director at BlueSquare Data, paid homage to the benefits brought by a dedicated network. “We chose a dedicated network because of its unique route which allowed us to bypass London, thus reducing costs and distances to our new data centre.”
By using a dedicated network, organisations are not limited to where they can place their new sites. A dedicated network solution gives businesses the flexibility to pick and choose the best locations for the best prices.
Data centres need secure, reliable networks and to take control of network resources. Dependency on public shared networks is starting to look tired, short-term and no longer fit for purpose. Equally, if data centres wish their private data to remain just that, they need to expand their security beyond the walls of their buildings and into the space between.
Dedicated fibre optic technology is not just a means of offering higher speeds, it is also the key to delivering cost efficiencies, future-proofing technology and ensuring much more secure infrastructure.
