Eric Jacobs, Chief Revenue Officer at Aligned Energy, highlights how an adaptive, scalable data center can prevent over provisioning.
Hyperscalers, cloud and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers, and even enterprises with high density computing requirements commonly over provision to eliminate the risk of falling short of the necessary IT capacity to support future business growth. Unpredictable usage and growth models are major challenges for these high-growth, high-capacity data center customers. At any given time, they must balance the pressing need of availability against the potential downside of overbuilding infrastructure.
Eric Jacobs, Chief Revenue Officer, Aligned Energy.
That said, over provisioning increases capital and operational expenditures, making for sometimes urgent — if not uncomfortable — conversations between the CFO, CTO and other members of the C-suite who are understandably concerned with the company’s bottom line.
Take for example the global tech giant about to release an exciting new business app, or the OTT content provider on the eve of the release of a new and potentially binge-worthy sci-fi series.
For these organizations, the challenge of strategically managing compute, network and storage capacity to keep up with surging demand is not unlike a family preparing for a nor’easter expected to bring blizzard snow conditions.
If the family gets to the shopping mart days before the storm makes landfall, there’s plenty of time to purchase adequate water for drinking and sanitation, along with plenty of ready-to-eat, non-perishable foods in the event the power fails, or travel conditions deteriorate. However, should the storm take a fortuitous turn out to sea, sparing their home, they’ve already stocked their cabinets with a weekend’s worth of canned fruits and vegetables and protein bars — wasted investments — they might not consume until next winter. Conversely, if the family fails to get to the store before the snow hits, they’re likely to find empty shelves upon arrival.
In essence, that is the hyperscaler’s dilemma. Due to the unpredictable nature of future needs, some may risk over provisioning when introducing new products or services, or expanding into new markets, thus increasing CapEx and OpEx at their own peril. Or, oppositely, others may simply be unable build or obtain data center capacity quickly enough where and when they need it — in other words, face aisles of empty shelves — which can slow if not completely block new revenue-generation.
In these scenarios, flexibility and scalability are business-critical when expanding or upgrading existing infrastructure, as is mitigating financial risk and ensuring on-time project delivery.
Providing Scalable and Flexible Solutions for an Avalanche of Data
In the digital economy, it’s an ongoing blizzard of data that concerns us, a potential whiteout that Cisco predicts will continuously grow at a rate of 40 percent per year. And just like a snow storm whose total precipitation can rise and fall and melt and freeze with shifting wind and temperature variability, another challenges hyperscalers, cloud and SaaS platform providers face is that compute loads are becoming more dynamic as capacity demand varies from project-to-project, month-to-month, or even day-to-day. Moreover, these data center customers require infrastructure that supports high, mixed and variable power densities to enable them to evolve without reconfiguring infrastructure or stranding capacity – lest they become a car in need of chains, or worse, stuck in a snowbank on the side of the road, metaphorically speaking.
In these scenarios, flexibility and scalability are business-critical when expanding or upgrading existing infrastructure, as is mitigating financial risk and ensuring on-time project delivery. To solve for these challenges, Aligned Energy provides adaptable, efficient data centers composed of build-to-scale infrastructure to support various IT densities to meet customer demand. This build-to-scale deployment allows Aligned Energy to deliver scalable data center solutions efficiently and as needed, eliminating over-provisioning.
Leveraging our standard delivery model, we can provision initial deployments of 2 to 20+ MWs of capacity, and scale beyond in as little as 12 weeks. When capacity can be delivered incrementally and on demand, then future-proofing doesn’t require over provisioning. New adaptive data center builds can be delivered in as few as seven to nine months. With Aligned Energy’s dynamic platform, hyperscalers are able to maintain ultimate flexibility, unprecedented density and efficiency throughout every aspect of their operations. In a word, we’re the only infrastructure provider uniquely positioned to supply the required capacity needed to address the coming avalanche of data — whether today, tomorrow or into the next decade.
Eric Jacobs is Chief Revenue Officer at Aligned Energy. Connect with Eric on LinkedIn.
Aligned Energy is a leading data center provider offering innovative, sustainable and adaptable colocation and build-to-scale solutions for cloud, enterprise, and managed service providers. Learn more about Aligned’s build-to-scale solutions by reading our latest case study.
