Multi-tenant Data Centers are Key to Managing Data Without Breaking the Bank

By LAUREN FAHEY AND TONY ROBINSON, Corning

With an increased demand on data centers caused by the massive expansion of the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (ML) and its associated power, cooling, and fiber connectivity requirements, many infrastructures need upgrading in order to keep up. Hyperscale operators and Fortune 500 organizations expect increased investments in AI/ML applications in order to improve their service offerings and improve business processes. The costs and resources involved in building a data center— as well as analzying and processing that data—are immense. Additionally, designing a data center with enough power and cooling for servers running AI/ML workloads while also eliminating latency, reducing downtime, and maintaining compliance with ever-evolving standards is quite a challenge.

What can your business do to incorporate AI/ML applications as part of your IT strategy—all while keeping costs down? What could be an effective data center strategy for your business? For many organizations, the answer lies in the multitenant data center.

A multitenant data center (MTDC), also known as a colocation data center, is a facility where organizations can rent space to operate their IT networks. MTDCs provide the space and and power for organizations to install their networking equipment.  Additionally, they provide connectivity to service providers at a minimal cost. Businesses can rent space to meet varying needs—from a server rack to a complete purpose-built data hall. The scalability of usage provides the business benefits of a data center without the high price.

Should I co-locate my data center in a MTDC?

The advantages of colocating data IT operations come down to three key factors: 1) cost, 2) uptime, and 3) security.

You can expect to see drastic improvement to your IT team’s capacity and ability to support the business when you begin to colocate your data center operations. Any IT team managing its own data center must constantly focus on maintaining, upgrading, and ensuring the data center is working at an optimum level at all times. There must also be the capability to expedite work when demand spikes, along with addressing downtime and data loss.

The costs involved with keeping your data center onsite extends to the wider business: building and maintaining data storage in-house, maintaining power, making repairs, ensuring security, and the physical footprint of the data center impact the business beyond these factors alone. This constant focus of managing the data center results in a lack of IT resources dedicated to business strategy. By colocating an MTDC facility, your business will be able to redeploy capital and resources into critical business initiatives for growth.

Reliability and scalability are critical. The key challenge is to ensure that the MTDC you select has a robust infrastructure that allows you to access data quickly and increase capacity at a moment’s notice—it is no easy task to deliver seamless bandwidth capacity for every provision.

Examples of overcoming this challenge can be found across the globe. For example, Pier DC is a Tier III certified MTDC in Western Australia. Tier III certification requires 100-percent uptime and multiple distribution paths to allow for no downtime for maintenance, repair, or replacement of equipment. To meet this, Pier DC deployed an all-optical- fiber cabling infrastructure. The high-density preterminated optical solution supports integrated control systems as well as passive optical cabling for customer crossconnects. This enabled Pier DC to provide their customers with the assurance that they will have access to their entrusted data and services at all times, regardless of demand spikes, capacity requirements, and moves, adds, and changes (MACs) that occur during the lifetime of any data center.

MTDC operators are constantly upgrading their facilities to support their customers increasing IT workloads. Some operators are building purpose-built facilities with technology designed to support high performance compute applications. This is a major benefit for organizations leasing space within the MTDC. They can take advantage of leading-edge technology in leased facilities without the upfront capital costs. More and more organizations are looking to colocate their IT networking infrastructure and services. In fact, industry analysts expect the global colocation data center market size will grow at a CAGR of 11.3% through 2026. As IT workloads continue to explode, it continues to be imperative that every data center meets future capacity requirements—and fast.

For many businesses, outsourcing to an MTDC facility is important for even more specific reasons.

• Accessing rapid deployment for low and high-density applications
• Leveraging the assurance of stringent service-level agreements (SLAs)
• Scaling quickly to meet higher-speed technologies and applications
• Sourcing maximum flexibility to assure future-readiness
• Reducing total cost of ownership (TCO)

MTDCs are focused on enabling rapid connections for their customers and providing offerings to meet a range of business, enterprise, and cloud needs. This attribute is attractive for organizations that need a partner to help them with their current and future IT networking needs.

One of the most important factors when it comes to looking for an MTDC is locality. Your business should be close to your facility, because reducing latency and increasing bandwidth are two of the biggest challenges associated with outsourcing. For example, if businesses colocate within MTDCs in another city or state, connection speeds may drop and can negatively impact on the output of IT applications.

From an infrastructure perspective, scalability is key. Scalability within the data center will support simple migration to higher data rate connections and applications—a vital factor for meeting future bandwidth and transmission speeds that the IT applications require. As data continues to generate and technological advancements continue to increase, the need for your organization to meet customer demands for zero latency and real-time access to data will as well.

An MTDC facility also provides a variety of cloud service provider and telecommunication carrier options. For example, if your organization delivers cloud services that require high speeds, you can look to outsource just that part of your business. Alternatively, if you solely need storage, then another MTDC facility might better suit your needs. As most businesses have a range of needs that more than one facility can address, it is important not to restrict your business to choosing one facility when the best solution might involve multiple.

Finally, network and physical security are important factors in choosing an MTDC facility. If your network is colocated, you will want to be certain it is protected from inappropriate access. For example, facilities with layered security zones would only allow authorized personnel to access certain network areas and physical barriers, like fencing and locks. You’ll also want an operator that has monitoring systems—such as CCTV or other systems that detect emergencies like fires or flooding. Background on security and monitoring will provide insight into how the MTDC facility will protect your data and support client security. Knowing the importance of these factors, it is common for MTDCs to address security as a business imperative.

You should also consider additional services when choosing an MTDC facility. In addition to the typical space, power, and connectivity services, many MTDC providers offer an extensive range of consultative services to ensure the organization complies with mandatory regulations and/or other industry requirements. Even when the customer is educated on and aware of these requirements, the MTDC provider may have dedicated teams of regional, national, and international regulatory compliance personnel whose sole aim is to keep abreast of the latest developments.

For business operators both big and small, running an IT network that processes massive amounts of data is no easy task. Migrating computing needs to an MTDC takes the pain out of data management and reduces operational expenditure. A future-ready MTDC should offer scalability, flexibility, modularity, and stringent SLAs to assure maximum uptime, client peace of mind, and rapid deployments to high-density applications when you need it—fast.

*As stated in this article.