Many New Zealand organisations, for a variety of reasons, grow more reluctant to commit in-house resources to their ICT needs. We’ve seen evidence of this over many years, as Software-as-a-Service has grown from suspect trend to commonplace. In 2012, due to the impact of natural disasters, lack of staff/expertise, changing business strategies, financial redistribution and more, the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Datacentres-as-a-Service (DCaaS) models are on the rise, with no signs of slowing.
As many of New Zealand’s datacentres are reaching their end of life (at 15-20 years), organisations are realising it is cheaper to level them and start again, and cheaper still – by a long shot – to go the hosted route.
There are almost endless variants of managed data centre hosted services, and not all datacentres are created equal. There is no one-size-fits-all model, and setups can range from fully managed and outfitted hosting to co-location services. The right fit for one business would likely not suit the needs of another at all.
"The term ‘hosted data centre services’ doesn’t entirely reflect how organisations approach data centre and hosting requirements,” says Roger Cockayne, general manager for Revera. "A better term might be the ‘as-a-Service’ computing stack. For example, for some, co-location is all that’s required. Others may have more complex requirements for IaaS or PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service). All these things are provided by datacentres and ‘hosted’ arrangements, but today’s client needs focus on services addressing specific elements within the overall computing stack. It’s more fluid and focused on client outcomes rather than static offerings.”
It costs far too much and takes far too long to make designing and building a new data centre a functional reality for most businesses. At the same time, facilities like the Level 3+, $80 million IBM data centre facility launched last year provide centres specifically oriented to managed, hosted services. The IBM data centre provides mid-sized to large organisations with a range of services, from strategic outsourcing and managed hosted services through to virtual server services, and was named the sixth greenest data centre in the world by Wired magazine.
And in May this year, Gen-i announced plans to complete a new, purpose built $10.5 million data centre in Christchurch by the end of the year, providing clients with a range of services from co-location, outsourcing and virtual servers through to network delivered and cloud services.
As New Zealand’s larger organisations continue to unbundle services, the demand for co-location, rather than fully managed hosting, is high. Co-location is often the first step of the journey toward IaaS, as a business consolidates and virtualises its platforms. This step is often seen as a way to test the waters before committing fully to the cloud.
There are typically three major components to moving to a fully managed solution, says Jeremy Nees, enterprise architect for Maxnet. These include the move from on-premise to off-premise, the move from physical to virtual services, and the move from in-house support to outsourced. Making all these changes at one time can be too much. Breaking these steps down into manageable pieces and looking at hybrid models, even if temporarily, can be the best way for an organisation to realise the full value of an existing investment or to retain control of certain parts of its systems.
"We recently migrated a law firm into our Auckland data centre,” Nees explains. "We started by ensuring they had appropriate connectivity in place to support their availability and performance requirements, before deploying test systems onto our virtual platforms. Once testing was complete they moved their existing equipment to our co-location environment, with us providing managed firewall and network services. We are now working with them on a project to provide backup services, and fully managed hosting (on our virtual platform) for one of their core business applications. Once that is complete, and as their hardware ages, we will continue to migrate services to a hosted model.”
In contrast, however, for infrastructure and cloud computing expert ICONZ, the greatest demand over the past five years has been for cloud-based services, due to the benefits of high availability and flexible commercial agreements. "Co-location is definitely an alternative,” says Deidre Steyn, head of marketing for ICONZ. "But the downside is that companies are back into investing in capex and equipment, which needs to bemanaged.”
"Co-location is a wonderful first step, but it’s simply transference,” adds Revera’s Cockayne. "On its own it won’t save you money. The high cost of data centre builds and modernisation has stalled industry capacity expansion, and as capacity shortage bites, third-party co-location is seen as a quick fix.”
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