Bandwidth to Support Your Data Center

By: John Shepler

Data centers are hot these days. Oh, not just the temperature of the air exiting the servers. Data centers are hot business. As businesses are transformed digitally and AI is implemented to improve productivity, all eyes are on the data center and what it takes to gain the benefits of this technology.

Not Yesterday’s Server Closet
You can see advances in data center technology as information tech has grown in importance. Once a company is big enough to have more than one PC, it needs networking to interconnect computers and shared resources such as storage, printers and servers. Hot and noisy racks of equipment are quickly moved out of the office and into their own room, which might be the size of a broom closet. Hence, the server closet.

Little rooms soon become big ones with lots of equipment, special floors and ceilings for wiring, uninterruptible power and heavy duty HVAC. This is the genesis of the data center. Today’s businesses are dependent more and more on information technology and require substantial data centers and staff to process and serve that data 24/7.

Some companies still choose to maintain their own data centers in-house or at remote facilities. Others outsource that function to colocation facilities or cloud service providers. Still others see the skyrocketing demand for data center services to support crypto and AI and look to get a piece of the action.

What Connections Do You Need?
Even if you keep everything in-house, you’ll need external connections. That’s at least broadband Internet and telephone connections. If you have other locations in the same area, you can’t go trenching your own cables. You’ll need carrier connections from point to point or connect everything via the Internet.

There are two flavors of Internet access. They are called dedicated and shared. Dedicated Internet Access or DIA offers the highest performance. Dedicated means that the connection is for your use only and no other company is on the same circuit… at least until you get to the core of the Internet. Since most of the congestion occurs in that first mile, DIA can avoid many slowdowns during peak usage times. Fiber optic DIA is available from 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps, with 100 Gbps available in some areas.

Shared Internet Access is what is available with Cable broadband and Fixed Wireless Access. Your cost is lower because you are not the only one using the line. How well this works depends on how sensitive you are to interruptions and how many high volume users are sharing the same link.

Your data center servers will also likely need Internet access. Most colocation and cloud facilities have multiple carriers serving their facilities. This give you the option to have redundant connections so that if one goes down, another service provider is unlikely to be out at the same time. You can set up an arrangement like this for your own in-house data center. Just be sure that the two or more Internet Service Providers are not sharing the same fiber or other facilities or you may lose all service with a single point failure.

You can also get dedicated Ethernet point to point fiber optic service between two or more of your own locations. This gives you high performance networking without the security issues and variable performance seen on the Internet.

Connecting to the Data Center
If you choose to place your equipment in a colocation facility or contract for cloud services, you’ll need a way to connect from your company building to the remote data center. Some companies choose to do this through the Internet, but you can get much higher performance and better security with a dedicated point to point line also called direct cloud access. This is a private fiber optic circuit that runs from your facilities to the cloud service provider no matter how far away. You’ll generally have lower latency and more consistent performance than connectivity via the Internet.

Do you need a high performance connection to a data center or cloud service or Internet service to the Internet? If so, get highly competitive prices and availability of connection services for your business locations now.

The Multiple Data Center Dilemma

With mergers and acquisitions on the rise, companies are finding themselves with a multitude of data centers. So, do you leave things the way they are or try to capture some cost savings thorough data center consolidation?

The solution may not be as simple as picking one data center to expand and moving everything there. For one thing, each of those data centers is likely somewhat unique. They have different equipment, applications and expert personnel. Even if you take half a dozen small server rooms and move them intact to one big data center, you still have the matter of connectivity.

Most companies have networking set up to support much higher levels of traffic within the facility than to the outside world. That’s changing, as cloud services become more accepted. But even users of cloud computing and storage have to face the fact that they need much higher WAN (Wide Area Network) bandwidth than they used to. That drives two things: cost and availability.

Yes, availability can be a show stopper. If all your facilities are located downtown in major metropolitan areas, you have suite of services and providers to choose from. Telecom service competition in densely populated areas will work to ensure that you get excellent pricing on your service contracts. But what if your facilities are now scattered among small, medium and large cities with some locations out in the boonies?

This is why you start with a paper study before you do anything. Figure out what the new traffic levels will be to and from your main center or centers and then price out bandwidth that supports those levels with some margin for growth. Also make sure that you aren’t at the high end of available service levels or you’ll find future growth completely stifled. Do you really want to make a major move now and then make another one in a few years?

Calculate new bandwidth levels to serve the rest of your business locations. Note that while their data centers may now be downsized or empty, WAN traffic levels will almost certainly be higher. After all, all that data that was stored and processed locally will now have to come from somewhere else.

While virtualization and equipment consolidation may eliminate a lot of hardware and its associated power and cooling costs, you need to make sure that you aren’t just adding that cost back in network service expense. Perhaps you’ll find that modestly priced T1 lines or Ethernet connections are all you need to provide connectivity for those remote facilities.

By the way, if you are going to be ripping out facilities and re-installing equipment, this could be the perfect opportunity to take a look at cost savings you might not otherwise think were worth the effort. One approach is to move everything to a colocation center rather than try to operate your own. The advantage is that you’ll get a better deal on shared resources like HVAC and backup power. Also, bandwidth prices are often best within a colo. There are no availability issues and little or no provisioning costs because multiple carriers are right there in the same building.

Another option is to take a look at cloud services rather than providing your own. Once again, access bandwidth becomes critical with appropriate backup circuits to ensure that you’ll always be able to connect with the cloud. You’ll be trading off the capital expense and ongoing maintenance and operations costs of running your own data center for monthly fees to the cloud service provider. It is a better deal? Do the paper study and see what makes sense for your particular situation.

Would you like some help with this? Our Telarus bandwidth consultants are happy to get your requirements and work out pricing and availability for a variety of options. This consulting service is provided gratis to IT managers with serious requirements. Why not get started now? Put in a quick inquiry for enterprise voice and data services now.



Note: Photo of data center equipment courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.