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stored on their premises,” he says.
“You are often left with some residual data that
people don’t want to take off site; perhaps for
security reasons, or perhaps they don’t want to
transfer security camera video over fibre optic cable
because it can be very expensive.”
Robert says many companies are using inefficient
systems and even though they may have only a few
servers, operational costs are still high.
“You can have a small data centre running at
200kVa with 200kW of cooling and they are only
taking a load of 35kW, so they are very inefficient,
but nobody wants to spend the money on the
infrastructure because it’s already a sunk cost. They
don’t want to downsize but they have these big bills
and are missing the real estate that the racks are
taking up.”
Robert says a big mistake he sees people making
is skimping on the cost in the initial set-up phase
of on –site data centres and this can have adverse
consequences down the track, not just with
operational costs but also in emergency situations.
After working with helping clients to implement
good practises so they are ready when faced with
a massive power outage, Robert says the right
infrastructure needs to be in place from the start.
He says the cost of losing data or having
your servers go-down in a black-out or similar
circumstances far outweighs the cost of having a good
initial server set-up; and he mentioned the experience
of Southwest Airlines as a cautionary tale.
Southwest Airlines had a data centre outage
which lasted an hour. The initial cost that could have
prevented the outage was predicted to be a few
hundred thousand dollars and the estimated cost of
the outage was around $62 million.
Installers and sellers of these solutions are
constantly driven to push the price down and that
presents a real challenge for the industry, particularly
when offering higher rates than competitors can
result in loss of business.
Consumer demand to access information reliably
and instantaneously has resulted in increasing
pressure to deliver distributed computing where it’s
needed. Robert says the market needs to embrace
converged infrastructure solutions even though it
may come at a larger initial cost.
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