No room at the inn

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Colocation, colocation, colocation: For years, it's been the mantra of companies facing data centre capacity issues. By turning systems and network equipment over to third-party hosting specialists with their own state-of-the-art premises, clients have been able to free up space on their own properties and plug into an external pool of IT skills to help manage that equipment.

But simply opting for ever-increasing square footage of hosting and server colocation space may not be sustainable over the long term, especially for companies in London. Figures from property consultants CB Richard Ellis, for example, predict that vacancy rates for data centres in the capital will plummet from 19 per cent in 2006 to just 3 per cent by 2009.

"All the signs point to a crisis situation in the near future as companies start to realise that data centre space has become a scarce and increasingly costly resource," says Chris Gabriel, head of solutions at Logicalis. "That's already forcing many London companies to look beyond the usual Square Mile and Docklands locations - and some have told me that Milton Keynes was the nearest location where they've been able to find data centre capacity."

In future, he adds, they will need to explore still further afield and, in response, the server colocation industry is scrambling to get hosting facilities up and running in emerging economies such as Eastern Europe, for example.

But if efficient IT practices were applied across the board in London, Gabriel estimates that up to 50 per cent more data centre space could be freed up. And at the same time, he adds, many companies would be able to eliminate much of the unnecessary cost associated with their current, inefficient IT management practices.

"As an industry, we can accept that available data centre space is dwindling fast, or work together to avert this crisis," he says. "Whether servers are located on your own premises, with a local hosting provider, or in a remote, offshore location, there's plenty that can be done to ensure that every square foot of space is used in the most optimal way."

Your Comments and Questions

Jeremy Head, 4 months ago

Thanks for the response Chris. On a very broad basis, is there a simple place to start when implementing a coherent processor/platform strategy?

Chris Gabriel, 4 months ago

Jeremy, the Inefficient Truth report available on here gives some good statistics, and I believe GAP are looking at cutting the numbers by industry sector. I think the most interesting cut is actually by platform. I know customers who have an IBM Z Mainframe running at 90% load while in the same room they have Intel running at 5%. I think that is the nub of the issue, there is no coherent processor strategy, but 3 or 4 platform strategies all with different dynamics.

Jeremy Head, 4 months ago

Do you have any statistics on average server efficiency within data centres? I wonder how average server utilisation rates compare between businesses and data centres, given that many servers in companies operate at around 10% efficiency.

James Walker, 4 months ago

The large Data hungry business e.g. Google, Microsoft are considering the concepts of setting up near the source of energy, e.g. Central Russia as the concept of energy costs being higher than the cost of connectivity. When looking at Central and Eastern Europe there are two elements one is the building legislations and the second is running. For building you need good contacts i worked on build work in Central Europe and our Consultant was ex Head of KGB. He knew how to make sure things happened. For running labour skills are high and costs are low unless you are Google and you bring in your own staff from USA to man your DataCentre.

Trevor Howard, 5 months ago

Interesting article. Have you got any tips for organisations thinking about moving their data centres offshore to emerging Eastern Europe? Are there many cultural or technological issues I should bear in mind, for instance?