Low Redundancy Data Centers? Providers Adapt As Tenants Seek Options (datacenterfrontier.com)

1sockchuck writes: Data center providers are offering space with less power infrastructure than traditional mission-critical facilities, citing demand from customers looking to forego extra UPS and generators in return for more affordable pricing. The demand for "variable resiliency" space reflects a growing emphasis on controlling data center costs, along with a focus on application-level requirements like HPC and bitcoin mining. Data center experts differed on whether this trend toward flexible design was a niche, or a long-term trend. "In the next 12 months,data center operators will be challenged to deliver power to support both an HPC environment as well as traditional storage all under one roof," said Tate Cantrell, CTO at Iceland's Verne Global. "HPC will continue the trend to low resiliency options." But some requirements don't change. "Even when they say they're OK with lower reliability, they still want uptime," noted one executive.

Comments

Variable resiliency?

[sinij]

Now that variable resiliency data centers are finally available, I can run my sometimes available services in the partially secure cloud space I am building.

Wait, what?

[HideyoshiJP]

I'm reading this as.. "Well, we need to have redundancy, and we're already ponying up this much money, but how can we spend less and still say we're "redundant?" I'm not faulting the datacenters for offering such a service, but the customers should really have a hard look in the mirror.

Re:Wait, what?

[tlhIngan]

I'm reading this as.. "Well, we need to have redundancy, and we're already ponying up this much money, but how can we spend less and still say we're "redundant?" I'm not faulting the datacenters for offering such a service, but the customers should really have a hard look in the mirror.

If you're using ONE datacenter, then yes, you need to take a good hard look at trying to save a few bucks.

But if you've got datacenters geographically spread out, or even have multiple data centers, do you need 99.999% uptime? If you implement your switching and load balancing correctly, then the failure of one datacenter means you shift to another one and go on. Maybe a bit of extra latency, but if you're geographically distributed, then it really doesn't make sense.

Sure, maybe one of your datacenters, your primary one is 99.999% reliable. But your auxiliary ones that serve to provide faster service to local clients, doesn't have to be - at the worst, they then have to wait more milliseconds to hit your primary.

There's plenty of opportunity for non-highly-redundant services as well - perhaps you have a personal website - save a couple of bucks a month to host it on a less reliable hosting service, because you don't necessarily need it up 24/7.

So it's good for operations that are already redundant and operations that can tolerate downtime.

Maybe you have a data center and use Amazon AWS to handle overload. Well, you can downgrade the reliability of the data center knowing you can spin up more AWS instances if the primary goes down. You're already paying for both services, and they can backup the other.

It's basically RAID - redundant array of independent datacenters.

Re:"OK with lower reliability,they still want upti

[acoustix]

Why? Failover keeps high uptime even if you have less reliable hardware.

Unless the unreliable hardware is your power source.