Microsoft’s Tiny Data Center Liquid Cooling Experiment Is a Big Deal. It’s even bigger than that time its researchers sunk a submarine-like data center in the ocean. It’s running production workloads. But the rack of servers submerged in engineered fluid inside a Microsoft data center in Quincy, Washington, is still somewhat of a science project, similar in its purpose to Project Natick, the hermetically sealed computer-filled capsule the company’s R&D… Read More
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Why is Cloud Repatriation Happening?
More and more organizations who went all-in on cloud early are now finding that some analytics workloads are better on-premises and are pulling those workloads back. There’s a popular notion that all analytics workloads are headed to the cloud, and if an organization’s workload isn’t in the cloud yet, they’re lagging behind. There are certainly some situations where moving analytics workloads to the cloud makes sense, but cloud isn’t the… Read More
7 Colocation Trends to Watch in 2021
Customers with legacy workloads and stringent compliance requirements are making colocation a component of their IT strategies, alongside cloud. Cloud repatriation, for example, is landing workloads in colocation provider’s data centers. In addition, colocation has become a springboard to the cloud for customers who want to move IT assets off site but aren’t quite ready to commit to public cloud platforms. Colocation is also getting a boost from edge… Read More
The Future of Data Centers in a Post Covid-19 World
Not since the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic has the world experienced such a profound public health crisis leading to transformational economic and social dislocation. The measures taken to suppress the virus have almost brought the global economy to a shuddering halt and affected many aspects of individuals and business’ daily lives. It has also made us all aware of the sheer importance of the Internet and web-enabled personal and business… Read More
Edge computing and the Impact on Cloud: Cannibalization or Iteration?
There continues to be a conversation around what the emergence of edge computing will mean for the wider cloud computing and infrastructure services market. In this article, we take a close look at the recent predictions from a Forrester Research analyst and compare with similarly dubious commentary from a Gartner analyst a few years back. Forrester Research. Forrester claims edge computing will hit an inflection point in 2021 and its… Read More
Pro Tips for Creating a Successful Data Center Migration Plan
Many factors can precipitate the need for a solid data center migration plan – growth beyond current capacities, mergers and acquisitions, hosting provider performance, real estate changes, local data center economics, density requirements, staffing considerations, green initiatives, etc. A data center migration is one of the most critical and complex IT tasks organizations are faced with today. The margin for error is near zero and the move timeline is typically… Read More
Hybrid Cloud and the Future of Colocation
Hybrid cloud is the most fertile ground for colocation providers to deliver new types of value. In a world where the vast majority of businesses are already using public cloud services, the ability to extend public cloud resources into private infrastructure is highly valuable. It means businesses can keep the workloads they already have running in public clouds, but without the compliance and cost headaches that can arise from having… Read More
Top Three Concerns When Migrating from On-Prem to a Colocation Data Center
Colocation data centers can’t fix every issue that your business faces. They can, however, provide protection and improved server uptime for mission-critical assets better than on-premises solutions or public data centers. As Gartner stated in its research, “Colocation is often used as a replacement for traditional data centers, because it offers higher availability, reliability, certified building tier levels, energy efficiency, dedicated facilities management and the ability to scale.” … Read More
Remote Hands: Why it’s more than a trend with smart Data Centers
Companies used to send their IT workers to colocation centers to perform routine maintenance on their hardware. As a result of COVID-19, companies have had to address the health and well-being of their employees in very specific ways. Over the last 12 months, there has been a 35 percent increase in Remote Hands services. While it used to be considered an add-on luxury at times, remote hands services have… Read More
Colocation vs. Cloud: What are the Key Differences?
Some might use the terms private cloud and colocation interchangeably, but they refer to two completely different things. The main distinction between colocation vs. cloud lies with functionality. A colocation facility operates as a data center that rents floor space to an organization that has outgrown its own data center, whereas the private cloud enables designated users within an organization to act as tenant administrators. Simply put, an organization can… Read More