Latency, sustainability and electricity prices

Quo vadis, data center? The Lünendonk study on data centers "between growth and regulation"The white paper addresses both the changes in the general conditions and their impact on the choice of location. The 39-page white paper is aimed at investors and operators as well as corporate managers responsible for data center site selection and is now available for free download in German and English at luenendonk.de and cbre.de.

The search for locations lies in the area of tension between latency, sustainability and electricity prices. New applications such as IIoT, blockchain and hybrid cloud computing require additional data centers in the centers and on the periphery.

In addition to the proximity to Internet nodes and the increasingly scarce space there, the availability of electricity and the spatial proximity to consumers of waste heat are now just as important factors in the search for a location as the capacity limits for backbone fiber optic lines.

"For the siting of data centers, the management concept is also becoming more important. The acceptance of a data center is now also increasingly related to sustainability and, in the future, also to the productive use of waste heat in order to increase the social acceptance of data centers - both at the municipal level and among the general public. As a result, the relevance of professional and future-oriented facility management continues to increase", says Thomas Ball, Partner at Lünendonk and Hossenfelder.

Most long-standing SAP customers have a tradition of owning their own data center. Here, sustainable consolidation and optimization took place over many years, so that the business advantage of a hyperscaler is marginalized in an overall view of the costs - all the more important now is a holistic approach, for which the Lünendonk study represents an important basis.

The foreword to the study states: "Companies that want to plan a data center today in a cost-effective and future-proof manner must take into account both the intended use and the probable market development.

An essential aspect is the search for suitable locations. Depending on the intended target, the initial search radius can be very large or is already limited from the outset. The choice of location is often a compromise between latency, availability of land, power supply and, increasingly, sustainability.

In addition to the choice of location, the management concept is decisive for trouble-free and economical operation. In a dynamic market, cooperation with a service partner can bring time and cost advantages if site search, transactions, operating concepts and operational technical and infrastructural services are bundled.

Most data centers require proximity to an international network node such as DE-CIX in Frankfurt am Main or AMS-IX in Amsterdam. This minimizes the distance that information must travel over fiber optic lines between the originating and receiving points.

This is at least true for all data centers connecting receivers at several different points in Europe and the world. "However, it is precisely there that suitable land is scarce and expensive. If the majority of the expected users are located in one region, a regional node connected to the backbone networks can therefore be a good alternative for most operators.", adds Anna Klaft, Business Development Manager for Data Centre Solutions at real estate services provider CBRE.

However, Internet of Things embedded in Smart Home and Smart City, Industry 4.0 and other applications such as autonomous driving will also take place in the periphery. Due in part to the advancing spread of 5G mobile communications, which brings significant advances over LTE/4G in terms of data rates and latency, these applications will increase the need for smaller data centers in the area.

"For around five years, there has been a significant increase in so-called edge data centers, which are placed close to where data originates. By 2025, the share of data volume stored and processed in edge data centers could rise to 75 percent. However, this development is not an alternative to the large data centers, but a complement" says Klaft.

Sustainability through waste heat

The environmental balance sheet of data centers can be improved not only by purchasing environmentally friendly electricity, but also by using the waste heat that is generated. This can help to reduce electricity requirements and thus emissions elsewhere. Companies planning a new data center in the future can therefore choose locations that allow waste heat to be fed into the local local and district heating network.

In a recent study, the consulting firm Techconsult, together with Gridscale, examined how companies are driving the modernization of their IT infrastructures.

The resulting study provides in-depth insights into the challenges enterprises face in their transformation, how to implement a future-proof cloud and data center strategy, and highlights the key use cases, benefits and process models of hyperconverged infrastructures.

The complete study is available now at gridscale.io/HybridCloud available. The study "Well equipped? Hybrid Cloud Infrastructures in German SMEs" was conducted by Techconsult on behalf of Gridscale and was created in partnership with the industry association EuroCloud Deutschland e.V..

For this purpose, 150 user companies from a wide range of industries with 50 or more employees were surveyed on deployment scenarios, process models and the status quo of hybrid cloud and hyperconvergent infrastructures (HCI) in next-generation IT operations.

Hyperconverged infrastructures

The study results clearly show that SMEs have recognized the signs of the times and that a majority of companies are absolutely aware that only the further development of rigid, outdated IT towards a dynamic, flexible and powerful IT infrastructure will help them to meet the increasing demands within a "digital world".

Cloud computing has become an important component of IT strategies. The future focus of company managers clearly lies in the use of hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures.

In the future, 40 percent of companies - and already one in two among large enterprises - want to significantly increase the flexibility and agility of their IT infrastructure by using mixed cloud models. However, hybrid cloud infrastructures quickly become a complex undertaking and often lead to disillusionment.

For example, 43 percent of companies are dissatisfied with the lack of provider independence, and for around a third of companies, management and administration, access and rights control (IAM) and a lack of internal expertise and resources are no less problematic in the operation of their hybrid cloud infrastructures. As a result, the actual goals such as agility, flexibility, scalability, less management effort, increased security and cost benefits fall by the wayside.

"Without the use of external experts, automation tools or innovative technologies such as HCI, these problems are difficult to solve. Infrastructure modernization incorporating hyperconverged solutions offers midmarket companies the opportunity to future-proof and flexibly set up IT infrastructure and data centers while at the same time mastering the complexity of hybrid infrastructures", says Frank Schmeiler, senior analyst at Techconsult.

Rapid deployment and simple management offer all the benefits of the cloud without having to forego the advantages of an in-house IT infrastructure. It is therefore hardly surprising that almost two-thirds of companies are already looking at hyperconvergent infrastructures and that these are either already part of the IT infrastructure, are planned within the next twelve months or are being considered in principle as an alternative.

The advantages that companies expect to gain from this are, in particular, greater scalability, improved data management and data backup, and increased efficiency and profitability. Another key factor for the respondents is a uniform management interface that makes it easier to administer, monitor and control hybrid cloud infrastructures.

This eliminates the need for separate management solutions for servers, storage networks, storage, virtualization, and the individual cloud services, achieving significant efficiency gains and freeing up resources for higher value tasks.