Notes from the Consultant's Jungle

‘Ever notice how difficult it is to find good data center space today?  It wasn’t all that long ago that I recall walking through (seemingly) acres of raised floor in mostly vacant hosting centers, being courted by the local sales team to place my infrastructure in their space. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What a difference a few years makes.  Today, it’s a Seller’s market when it comes to raised floor space.  The market is especially tight if you’re looking for larger amounts of contiguous space.  If you’re looking to plant, say 10,000 or 20,000 square feet of racks at a collocation provider today,…. Fa-get-a-bah-dit (well, almost).

 

 

 

 

 

 

There’s an additional complication though.  Besides looking for a quantity of IT space, enterprises today are also interested in Tier-3 or higher space.  Hosting customers want the extra “9” in the availability number, and so to their Customers.  If a higher Tier rating is required in your search, the pool of candidates is likely limited to those facilities constructed over the past few years.

 

 

 

Let’s not forget too, the cost component that I sometimes call “The Infrastructure Tax.”  Hosting providers have had to find a way to pass on the (steeply) rising cost of power and cooling to their customers.  In Atlanta where my office is located, power is still relatively cheap, but in other parts of the world where we serve our Clients, the cost of power and the margins applied by the hosting provider can be quite hefty.  In some cases, the all-in expense of using a collocation provider can compete with a build/own approach from a 5-year ROI perspective.

 

 

If you’d care to share your recent experience with finding high-Tier collocation space in your part of the world I’d be delighted to hear about it.