What is On-Demand Colocation?
In 1965, American engineer Gordon Moore predicted that the number of transistors per silicon chip doubles every year. Since the start of the colocation industry in the 1990s, following Moore’s Law, IT equipment has in fact doubled performance every 12 to 18 months. Network bandwidth has also grown exponentially. However, with the exception of incremental energy efficiency improvements, the colocation service itself – space, power and cooling – and how it’s provisioned, has changed very little in decades.
Businesses turn to colocation to shift staff and resources from data center management to focus on IT infrastructure and business priorities. These businesses leverage the expertise and economies of scale a colocation provider offers as well as gain improved uptime and availability. It’s more cost effective as organizations avoid large capital outlays or long-term leases for building and refreshing data center infrastructure and they get better access to network bandwidth than what’s available in an in-house data center. Capacity is scaled as needed so building or leasing plans can shift from a 10 to 15 year horizon to a one to five year colocation service contract.
While colocation offers many benefits, it hasn’t kept up with the pace of change – which is only getting faster. We’ve seen cloud redefine the speed of provisioning, but we’ve also been constrained by security and control concerns.
What’s needed is a model where dedicated hardware and network infrastructure is more cloud-like in its deployment and consumption model. Enter on-demand colocation.
What is on-demand colocation?
On-demand colocation is the ability to point, click and provision compute, storage, and network resources on-demand within a colocation data center. Based on a software-powered data center architecture, on-demand colocation offers a broad range of colocation and connectivity services in minutes.
Why is it needed?
IT infrastructure needs to be more dynamic and faster to respond to the needs of a business. Unfortunately, planning, procuring, and deploying new IT infrastructure take three to six months to deploy the infrastructure for a single application. It simply takes too long. Cloud is an option. But for organizations that need control or don’t have applications architected properly for the cloud, it’s not necessarily a viable option.
Further, organization today are frustrated by rising cost and complexity of network connectivity within the data center, concerned with security of IT infrastructure in light of the constant news stream of security breaches and uncertain of future IT needs that makes predicting data center connectivity and capacity needs challenging.
Who needs on-demand colocation?
On-demand colocation meets the needs of organizations that want to take advantage of on-demand deployment and consumption, speed time to market and run “headless” data center operations but avoid the risks and loss of control associated with public cloud platforms.
Where can I get on-demand colocation?
Cyxtera delivers the Cyxtera Extensible Data Center (CXD) platform. CXD’s software-powered, on-demand provisioning and configuration enables you to deploy data center network connectivity and services in minutes, not weeks or months.
Learn more by reading the CXD data sheet.
Views and opinions expressed in our blog posts are those of the employees who made them and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Company. A reader should not unduly rely on any statements made therein.
Share this Post