Pros and cons of shared data centre services

The need to reduce IT costs while increasing IT agility is driving accelerating demand for IT as a service - and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) in particular.

That's the view of Hennie van Tonder, head of Product at MWEB Business, who adds that another factor contributing to IT complexity is increasing demand from a mobile and remote workforce for the same level of access to corporate data and systems as on-site personnel.

He notes the business landscape has changed irrevocably in the last 10 years, as businesses have come to rely on technology, data and automation not for any tangible strategic advantage, but often just to keep up in today's marketplace.

"A major problem for many businesses is that, despite the difficult economic climate, their need for increased computing power doesn't diminish. However, the upfront capital expense (capex) needed to upgrade or invest in additional servers can be prohibitive. A solution based on incurring operational expense (opex) such as that offered by shared data centres can be more attainable," Van Tonder adds.

Affordability is only one of the benefits of shared data centres. Data centre providers like MWEB Business offer customers flexibility, cost savings and reliability: flexibility through the provision of various options, with the ability to quickly and easily scale up or down based on current business needs; and cost savings as a result of economies of scale; and reliability as a result of expertise in designing and implementing solutions, as well as in-built redundancy and fail-over systems.

"There are many shared data centres both in South Africa and abroad that offer a range of hosting/data centre solutions. The trick for each business is to do a situation analysis in order to understand both current and future business infrastructure needs," Van Tonder says.

Among the most popular data centre services are:

Co-location/rack space hosting: businesses own their own servers, which are hosted in the service provider's secure, environmentally controlled data centre, with its in-built connectivity, redundancy and guaranteed 24/7 power supply. The business can either manage and maintain its own servers; or the service provider can manage and support some or all systems on the servers, including critical information and/or business systems; Web site and mail servers; backup and anything else that may be required. Hardware support may also be available.

Managed server hosting: the business "rents" its physical servers from the service provider. The service usually includes a full management and support option. A range of servers - from basic, entry-level for those with a conservative budget to high-end, power machines - is usually available.

Virtual server hosting: A cloud-based solution that opens the door to a full range of computing infrastructure, power and processes, quickly and affordably. It enables a business to rent server capacity - as opposed to the server itself - on demand. It delivers the performance of a server, the convenience of a hosted solution and the flexibility to upgrade and downgrade hardware specifications - including the ability to create additional virtual machines as required.

Virtual data centre: this is a data centre in the cloud - a hosting solution which allows full control of virtual machines, RAM, processing power and storage, offering the flexibility to define, create and manage your data centre, but without the cost of equipment, power, network and manpower. This is true IaaS.

Which is the "best" solution? In order to assist businesses to choose, MWEB Business has listed a few of the pros and cons associated with each type of hosting service.