Jan-Feb 2020 - ChannelVision Magazine

Martin Vilaboy Editor-in-Chief martin@bekabusinessmedia.com Gerald Baldino Contributing Editor gerald@bekabusinessmedia.com Percy Zamora Art Director percy@bekabusinessmedia.com Berge Kaprelian Group Publisher berge@bekabusinessmedia.com (480) 503-0770 Anthony Graffeo Publisher anthony@bekabusinessmedia.com (203) 304-8547 Mitch Beyer Digital Marketing Manager mitch@bekabusinessmedia.com Beka Business Media Berge Kaprelian President and CEO Neil Ende General Counsel Corporate Headquarters 10115 E Bell Road, Suite 107 - #517 Scottsdale, Arizona 85260 Voice: 480.503.0770 Fax: 480.503.0990 Email: berge@bekabusinessmedia.com © 2020 Beka Business Media, All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in any form or medium without express written permission of Beka Business Media is prohibited. ChannelVision and the ChannelVision logo are trademarks of Beka Business Media When Capital One announced that it had closed its last data center, some saw it as a type of death knell for the data center space. After all, few organizations require more reli- ability and security than one of the largest financial institutions. “If a big bank can jump into the public cloud, why can’t we?” Not so fast. Although a full quarter of 451 Research’s Alliance Member companies do plan to decrease data center rack space during the next two years, primarily in favor of a migration to public clouds and increased use of virtualization, 36 percent plan to actually increase rack space during that period. And while more than one in 10 companies surveyed by 451 stated plans to close existing facilities, 20 percent plan to open new data centers in the coming 24 months. The need to host new applications is the primary driver behind increases in data center rack space, said 451, but many enterprises also are expanding their data centers in order to improve security (cited as the primary challenge in data center management), create or ex- pand internal clouds, accommodate data center consolidation and enhance disaster recovery. Use of colocation facilities also is growing, albeit at a somewhat slower pace than racks space expansion in private facilities. For example, 29 percent of 451 Alliance companies plan to decrease colocation space during the next two years, while 38 percent plan to in- crease their colocation space. Further bucking the trend toward the cloud behemoths, 27 percent of enterprises surveyed have migrated applications/workloads from public clouds to colocation providers during the last year. “Although this data will not cause public cloud providers to quake in their boots,” said 451 analysts, “it does point out some of the chinks in their armor.” For starters, despite the strides that cloud providers have made in protecting data and facilities, IT managers still have concerns regarding security (cited by 50 percent of the companies that migrated applications/workloads from public clouds to colocation providers). Many companies also believe that colocation is less expensive and enables more predict- able cost profiles than public clouds, the data showed. The top reasons for added colocation space overall include disaster recovery, improved reliability, data center consolidation and IT’s ongoing shift from capex to opex models.  Mixing Environments Which of the following IT environments are currently in use to support your organization (Select all that apply) We own and operate server rooms and/or server closets 68% We own and operate data center facilities 63% We utilize cloud service providers 52% We rent space at colocation providers 30% We outsource data centers to third-party managed providers or outsourcers 21% Source: 451 All the while, an increasingly important feature that enterprises are looking for is data center infrastructure management (DCIM) software – for both their internal and external facilities. Among 451 Alliance companies, 71 percent consider DCIM to be an important feature when choosing co- location providers. An even newer trend is data center management as a service (DMaaS), which helps to improve efficiency, prevent outages and lower maintenance costs, thanks in part to the ability of AI and machine learning to extract more value from telemetric data. Ultimately, enterprises simply are using a mix of environments to host their data center operations, said 451, while at the same time, a host of innovations are hitting the market to improve data center efficiency, such as new chips, Open Compute, liquid cooling, solid- state storage and “software-defined everything,” among other features. Data center and colocation providers that can stay one step ahead of the big battleships, and turn a bit more quickly, likely will continue to find demand for their services. Data Centers Aren’t Dead Yet LETTER 6 CHANNEL VISION | January - February, 2020