The Dynamic Data Center: Pay as You Grow

Dynamic data centers have become the need of the hour. The market place is undergoing a rapid consolidation, and clients are finding it increasingly difficult to predict their data center requirements. The winner in such a dynamic environment is a data center that takes this change into account and offers flexible solutions to its clients.

Changes in organizations are happening overnight. Many organizations are going the mergers and acquisitions route to keep up with the competition. This can lead to shifts in the number of users and geographies that data centers need to support. Network demands are fluctuating, too. When companies adopt for more VoIP services and video services, the network utilization spreads in breadth, whereas technologies such as application and desktop streaming lead to more network utilization at headquarter locations.

There is a trend in today’s marketing landscape of using viral approaches. This is a nightmare to any data center manager, since the bandwidth utilization cannot be predicted at all in a viral scenario. The last thing that is needed for a viral marketing campaign is for its servers to crash and its users to face downtime in the midst of the campaign. These scenarios require data centers to become more flexible and adaptive and the best solution in this case is to follow the pay as you grow approach. This approach creates a win-win situation for both the customer and the data center alike.

An example of a successful pay as you grow licensing model is the one used by NetScaler from Citrix. This model is applicable to both hardware and software upgrades, where IT managers can on demand increase the capacity of their systems if they feel the need to do so. The model is extremely empowering and provides extreme flexibility from a performance range of 10Mbps to 50Gbps per unit.

Small and Medium Businesses (SMB) are the ones that face this challenge considerably. The data storage growth rate is exponential with a CAGR of 60 to 80 percent being the norm. These organizations are also the ones that need 100% availability since they are mostly web facing. Pay as you grow is the perfect pricing model for these organizations.

Lifeline Data Centers is one of the unique data centers in the Midwest region that provides a flexible pricing model taking into consideration the elastic nature of demand in today’s market. For a free quote and to know more about the pay as you grow pricing option, do get in touch with their experts today.

Alex Carroll

Managing Member at Lifeline Data Centers

Alex, co-owner, is responsible for all real estate, construction and mission critical facilities: hardened buildings, power systems, cooling systems, fire suppression, and environmentals. Alex also manages relationships with the telecommunications providers and has an extensive background in IT infrastructure support, database administration and software design and development. Alex architected Lifeline’s proprietary GRCA system and is hands-on every day in the data center.