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Evaluating Infrastructure Delivery Options

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Aug 19 2009

Have you ever been inside a large data center? Spinning hard drives, blinking LEDs and network cables can be quite impressive when you're surrounded by thousands of them, but that image quickly fades for most non-IT staff when they leave the raised floor. In reality, aside from an occasional techno-buzz we might get from a new gadget or application, the value of computing for most business people tends to be in the information, not in the data center. That said, evaluating infrastructure delivery options for your mission critical applications is an important process; let's spend a few minutes thinking about the options.

So, what sets one data center apart from another?  For starters, data center facilities are usually classified into one of four tiers; Tier I being the least fault tolerant and Tier IV being able to withstand a worst-case scenario unplanned failure without impacting availability.  You can visit the Uptime Institute's website if you'd like to learn more about the classifications or uptime in general.  Bottom-line: highly redundant data center's can be very expensive to build and manage, and settling for less redundancy than you need might leave your business in the dark when you can't afford to be. 

For many companies, renting highly redundant data center space can be a great alternative to building out these costly facilities.  If the outsourced data center model makes the most sense for you, you'll still need to decide who will manage your equipment.  There are two traditional models you can consider:

  1. Collocation - The data center provides you with a physically secure facility, space on the raised floor, power, air conditioning and basic network connectivity.  Your company's IT team deploys and manages the infrastructure technology your solution requires (servers, storage, backup solution, advanced networking, etc.).  Essentially, you're just renting the space.
  2. Fully Managed - In this model, you can usually decide between buying the infrastructure technology yourself and renting it from the provider.  In either case, the provider will manage the technology either entirely or up to a predefined limit, including the management of the application layer.  Your team will work closely with the provider to define roles and responsibilities and set proper expectations. 

So which model should you choose?  Well, there are advantages and disadvantages to both, and the decision often comes down to total cost of ownership (TCO), regulatory requirements and how much energy you want your team to invest in managing infrastructure technologies.  

In the next post in this series, we'll discuss some of those advantages and disadvantages, and then we'll add Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) to the list of options to consider.

 

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Dec 11 2009

Joyce Emerson said:

Reading this article was a "techno-buzz"...looking forward to Part 2.

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