Regardless of the popularity of the cloud and availability of colocation spaces, many companies find that storing data at a remote location is a better option. Having a data center gives you total control over your company's IT infrastructure. Unfortunately, data centers also frequently have very high occupancy cost on both an overall and per square foot basis. Given that they're expensive to build, secure and operate, maximizing their efficiency can generate real savings.
What is this post about: To provide tips to companies with remote data centers to reduce occupancy cost through power control, site selection, system management and buildout costs.
Control Power Costs
A large portion of power cost control comes from IT management rather than corporate real estate operations. Choosing efficient servers and properly balancing loads for maximum per kilowatt is definitely an IT issue. However, the corporate real estate team has access to expertise in two areas that can help IT teams save even more money:
1. Cooling System Design - The high density of many data centers brings up an additional challenge - keeping everything cool. Bringing in a corporate real estate team's HVAC experts can help to design systems that meet cooling requirements while also managing occupancy cost.
2. Site Selection - There are instances when a data center has to be located in a specific physical location. For instance, some financial services firms need to be have physical proximity to exchange data centers for faster trade execution. However, for most data centers, the few-millisecond latency difference between a Greenwich, Connecticut and a Des Moines, Iowa-based location is unimportant. Nonetheless, the average cost of electricity in Iowa is half what it is in Connecticut. When corporate real estate intelligence is ignored in site selection decisions, its possible to mismanage operating expenses.
A large factor in minimizing occupancy costs at data centers is geographical placement.
Read this article about the best markets for industrial real estate.
DCIM
One of the hottest concepts in the IT industry is data center infrastructure management. "DCIM" software helps to holistically manage every aspect of a data center. While IT departments focus on the control and flexibility it gives them, it can also help to control occupancy cost. DCIM software can plug into the building's mechanical systems to balance cooling and power distribution. Optimizing a data center's operations can also help to reduce power usage by only running necessary processors, and maintaining their peak efficiency. Many DCIM packages can also help with space planning. This allows your company to put as much computing in as little space as possible, reducing your overall occupancy cost as you use physically smaller data centers.
For more tips on reducing occupancy costs, check out
3 Quick Fixes to Shrink Warehouse Occupancy Costs.
Seek Out Existing Space
Data center space is outrageously expensive to build. For example, as of April 2013, Facebook is spending roughly $1,070 per square foot for a 1.4 million square foot data center in Iowa. One way to manage your occupancy cost is to seek out buildings that have already been configured as data centers.
There is a good chance that you will need to do extensive work to reconfigure an existing building to your uses, and that its existing HVAC and power delivery systems may be obsolete for your needs. However, you can also benefit from leveraging the building's existing security infrastructure. Look for special flooring or ceilings already installed that you can use to route wiring. If you're located in an area that is prone to violent weather, you can also leverage the existing building's architectural hardening. All of these features help to lower your overall cost.
Data centers present unique technological challenges. However, underlying the advanced technology they hold, they're buildings like any other. Your corporate real estate experts can apply their occupancy cost management experience to provide your business with better IT infrastructure at lower occupancy cost.
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