Potential Challenges Facing Hosting Providers

Today, as demand for colocation and wholesale data centers continues to grow, colocation providers are responding to future market forces that represent both tremendous opportunities and significant challenges.

Data center providers are dealing with changing technology needs, emerging trends and increasing competition, and are changing their models to best respond to all these developments, ensuring they are prepared for future customer needs. Be prepared.

In addition to industry shifts creating emerging models, competing in the colocation data center industry is not easy. It can be challenging to compare providers that offer the same features and quality of service, allowing users to differentiate between providers and ultimately decide which provider's services best meet their infrastructure needs.

It is important for users to always keep in mind that they evaluate what a hosting provider is dealing with in the context of the wider industry. Here are some of the trends that are having a major impact on the colocation data center industry:

Shifting Technology Requirements

As IT technology and application development become more flexible and redundant, data centers Equipment vendors are seeing some of their users reduce their need for redundancy (from 2N redundancy to N+1 or even N). Over the years, the power density of racks has become higher and higher, but the average power density in the data center industry is still 6 to 8 kilowatts per rack.

But now people see that rack power density is increasing day by day to support more computing-intensive workloads and applications brought about by cloud computing, big data, the Internet of Things, and even 5G technology. To meet the needs of their customers, colocation providers now need to be more flexible to adapt to changing technology needs, moving towards "flexible and repeatable" build methods (flexible, prefabricated modular power supplies and room space containment).

This is advantageous for users of managed services, who can find a provider that can meet their current needs and can be flexibly configured as needed.

Influence of industry giants

Large cloud computing providers, including Internet giants such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, occupy a large amount of data center space and promote users' demand for hosting services. Many needs. While this is good for colocation providers, as these industry giants consume large amounts of available space and drive future data center builds, it is also changing some of the requirements for traditional colocation providers to provide services.

Internet search engine service providers or content providers need to meet the redundancy requirements of different physical infrastructures of financial institutions. This supply and demand relationship has pushed the data center industry back to the era of "speculation".

increasing competition

Many colocation data center providers are increasingly facing cost pressures, which often leads them to cut back on their current offerings to reduce losses in the competition. And more proactive providers are looking for ways to further optimize their data center operations while delivering superior results and customer experience to their customers.

It’s easier than ever to find and match users’ business and IT needs, risk appetite and requirements. There are many excellent providers willing to work together and establish the right approach for users' outsourcing needs. As competition intensifies, there is a need to make services more relevant and meet the needs of suppliers and consumers.

While users face these challenges as they evaluate the right colocation provider for their business, colocation data center providers are also looking to balance data center operational changes with continued innovation.

Things to Consider Before Signing a Contract

As a potential colocation data center user, it is important to look beyond the basic variables of price or occupied space to gain a deeper understanding of what the vendor offers and the status of current operations. A thorough exploration of data center facilities will help you choose the provider that best suits your needs and avoid any surprises after signing a service level agreement (SLA).

transparency. Transparency is crucial when evaluating hosting providers. As a user, it is necessary to give your provider as much visibility into your operating environment as possible. For example, do they have a formal change management process? Do they have an incident response team? Do they conduct emergency simulation drills? How often is maintenance of critical infrastructure performed and what is its content? Can maintenance reports be provided? If there is any response to these issues If the answer is no, or the provider is unable or unwilling to share this information, that should alarm users.

As users, you need a supplier that is open and transparent about their business and has documentation to prove that they are not just talking on paper. Providing transparency also fosters stronger partnerships, which allow suppliers and customers to work together to achieve common goals.

Built-in controls. Another factor of concern to users is capacity management. Whether it is power transformers, power plants, fuel supplies or refrigeration equipment, it is critical that users understand how much capacity their suppliers have and how to plan for supplier management capabilities. Some questions are important: Are there others on the shared resource? How many people will affect me?

Oversubscribing existing power and cooling resources (based on actual usage) can be a dangerous strategy, and sometimes there are often unknown threats until something happens. This puts users' IT infrastructure at risk, so hosting providers must have built-in controls in place when it comes to managing and reporting on power, cooling, and even space and capacity.

Manage delays. Additionally, network connectivity and latency are critical in relation to the business applications users are looking to outsource. Therefore data center location is important. Additionally, the ability to spin up a disaster recovery site is a very important consideration: does it have to move the business (i.e. compute, network, and storage) or does it all need to be migrated? Since certain applications can have a significant impact on latency throughout the network, So users must know the applications they want to move to a colocation data center and their latency requirements to ensure the provider can meet those needs.

User Portal. A hosting provider's user portal is often an afterthought, but can help uncover some highlights in these areas. A well-designed customer dashboard can provide a comprehensive service view, performance monitoring and measurement, and capacity statistics to track or monitor ongoing work. Therefore, users should request a demo of the portal to understand the assets, statistics, and operational information they will have ongoing access to.

For many organizations, choosing a managed services provider will be one of the most important decisions they make and will have a significant impact on achieving their business and operational goals. When prepared, the right provider will take the time to listen and understand what your business goals are and how the partner can help you achieve them.