Power and the glory

Where should your datacentre facilities be located to maximise your margin? Steve Davis looks at ways to save energy - and money

Many resellers have realised that cloud and virtualisation offer huge business opportunities, not least as these enable you to engage customers in more conversations about technology refreshes and upgrades.

This includes those selling colocation, IaaS and SaaS solutions, as well as those who are new to the world of datacentres. But how and where should these offerings be hosted? Done well, handsome additional revenue can be earned.

Supplementary revenue and margin can be made on the space for housing and hosting the racks, as well as the electricity to run them. Key criteria include security, available space, rental costs and bandwidth, but the power supply is often overlooked.

Issues of power availability and reliability are crucial. In the past, an average server used only 10 per cent to 15 per cent of capacity, but it is now possible to run 20 to 40 virtual machines on a server. While this is far more efficient, both from a hardware and an energy perspective, a power problem experienced by one host could easily bring down many important services.

Without high power availability per rack in the first place, you could be forced to use more racks, thus eating into your eventual overall profits. Also, any unscheduled power cuts can be disastrous and take considerable time to rectify, so resellers should carefully check the maintenance processes that are being provided behind the infrastructure.

Things rarely go to plan, and while an outage may last only 30 minutes it can take all day - or longer - to rebuild an implementation.

Provisioning with two 4kW circuits can maintain one circuit safely and still meet certain SLAs.

A chunk of the racks installed in datacentres now consume more than 5kW and and some will consume more than 10kW. Few can supply this level of power per rack today, and this will only get worse. Consider the “rackonomics”. Which type of rack hardware should be used for running the various applications and services concerned?

Location, location, colocation

Many think that running lower-density racks will be cheaper, but this is a misconception. Apart from savings made on colocation floorspace, running fewer high-density racks will yield a lower total cost of ownership. Although they have superior compute capabilities, they use fewer datacentre resources when it comes to switchgear, UPS, power, cooling towers and pumps, chillers, lighting and so on.

It may appear convenient to have the colo datacentre on the doorstep in a converted metropolitan office building, but there may be compromises in terms of future expansion. This is not just about actual floor space but the power-to-rack availability. Some city locations are already struggling to provide 1kW or 2kW per rack.

So do you or your customers really need to be on-site frequently, at the datacentre, hugging the servers? Cheap, high-speed fibre and sophisticated remote monitoring apps mean new datacentres can be further afield. Some of the larger purpose-built regional datacentres may well offer better margins for colocation and hosting.

Steve Davis is sales director at Next Generation Data (NGD)