Thinking about moving a data center?

Thinking about moving a data center? Many organizations are. A few things are driving this trend:

Uptime – Uptime is more important than it used to be. More businesses “bet the business” on the availability of their computer systems. The costs of data center downtime can be high: lost credibility, lost revenue and lost clients.

Moving the office – The buyers market for office space is appealing to many companies. And along with the office move, the old enterprise data center in the converted office in the back room has to move too.

The big switch – Many companies who have used outsource data center facilities for their secondary or disaster recovery data center are switching locations of their primary and secondary data centers. Most organizations do this to improve uptime, but there are other reasons as well.

The costs of building a data center is high. Data center capital costs for 1000 square feet can easily exceed $1 million. And the costs of ongoing support for the facilities are significant as well.

Why are in-house data centers so expensive to own and operate? Data centers are a combination of two complex disciplines: information technology and mission critical facilities management. Server management is very different from managing multiple utility feeds, generators and UPS systems. Network management is very different from expertise in hardened data center construction techniques. The expertise required to build and operate 99.995% uptime data center just doesn’t exist in most organizations.

Cost and expertise are the reasons why so many companies have adopted some form of colocation or cloud computing for primary data centers and disaster recovery centers. Wholesale and retail colocation allow companies to farm out the facilities expertise and concentrate on the information technology. Cloud computing further simplifies owning and operating a data center by allowing companies to farm out both facilities and some part of the information technology.

Whether you have a large data centers or a small ones, moving it is a complex set of projects. Talk to the data center facilities experts before building a new data center.

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.