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.

Re:Variable resiliency?

[ls671]

Yeah, planning in advance for quantum computing where everything is relativistic, including up time, I just provisioned 8 identically configured cloud nodes with different variable resiliency providers with every provider guaranteeing a 75% uptime.

This allows me to have 99.9984800% uptime given the probability that all nodes are down at the same time.

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?

[R3d M3rcury]

Again, a particular service is not mission critical, so we don't need to spend the money to make it so. Things like test servers and the like could fall into this category. After all, you really don't need 99.999997% uptime for this.

At least until the power goes out at the data center and you've got a room full of testers and developers sitting around waiting for it to come back on and there's a deadline looming. Then you don't look so smart for saving an extra few bucks a month.

I wonder how dynamic the services like that are. I could see, say, going with the less reliable service for 10 months and, as I approach crunch time, telling them "reliability is key" and paying the extra money for those couple months.

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.

advertising vs reality

[Gravis Zero]

why would you want to pay for 99.99% uptime when it's rarely provided?

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.

Re:Bitcoin mining?

[ls671]

My bitcoin mining rig is on a satellite orbiting mercury and is powered exclusively by the sun. I am currently the top world wide (galaxy wide?) producer of bitcoins.

Increase infrastructure costs 200%-400%

[raymorris]

The cost is two to four times higher. The basic idea is you can choose:

___Non-redundant A-only power____
1 router (1 amp) + 1 switch (1 amp) = 2 amps.
You need one power plant capable of providing 2 amps.

___Redundant with A/B power___
2 routers (2 amps) + 2 switches (2 amps) = 4 amps
You need two sets of power, each capable of providing the 4 amps, so 8 amps total.

Note you need not twice as much power capacity, but FOUR TIMES as much in order to have full A/B redundancy. Plus the more complex (expensive) design with more transfer switches, etc.

Twice as many PDUs feeding twice as many routers and twice as many switches take up twice as many racks, which means twice as many square feet, and almost twice as much power and cooling cost.