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

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 analyzing 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.

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.

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 for hyperscalers. This is a major colocation benefit for organizations leasing space within the MTDC. 

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.

The MTDC also provides services related to the operation and maintenance of the buildings, such as providing utilities, controlled humidity, security, fire protection, common area maintenance and cleaning, and building upkeep.

Multitenant data center scalability and reliability 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.

Through a taxable REIT* subsidiary (TRS), MTDC’s will provide connectivity services such as facilitating a tenant’s access to other tenants’ equipment within a building or between buildings. The tenants will adequately compensate the TRS for such services.

Nonrecurring colocation data center costs include tenant cage design assistance and build/install, connectivity to ISPs, NSPs, and CSPs, and managed services.

*Real Estate Investment Trust - in the United States, a REIT is a company that owns, and in most cases operates, income-producing real estate. 

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.

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 multitenant data center 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.