Robin Ellis, group commercial director, BlueSquare Data says that it is important to make the right business choices when planning your datacentre

Making the right choice in business is like planting a seed; pick the best location and your business will grow and blossom – get it wrong and there is a chance it could wither and struggle to develop.  For CIOs who need to improve the resilience and quality of their company’s IT infrastructure and safeguard its data, while at the same time improving its environmental credentials and reducing IT expenditure, the right choices are vital. 

If your business’ data is the seed, then the data centre is the soil.  The first choice to make is to decide on the type of data centre which will be used for your data.  The Uptime Institute publishes guidelines which cover the building of data centres to specific standards, ranging from tier I to tier IV.  For most CIOs, the choice will be between data centres built to a tier III or tier IV specification.  Tier IV data centres offer N+N redundancy, meaning that there is no single point of failure within the data centre, whilst tier III data centres are only capable of offering N+1, meaning they are less able to cope with multiple equipment failures.  In delivering this level of redundancy to support their business critical operations, CIOs also need to be mindful of the energy efficiency of their chosen data centre, as it too will need to support the company’s carbon reduction goals and policies.
The decision may have already been made for you if you work in a regulated industry, such as those under the guidance of the Financial Services Authority (FSA).  The FSA has strict requirements as to how data is backed up and stored, and public sector bodies and the NHS Trusts have also been advised by the Government that they should back up their data in high level data centres. 

Gardeners want to make sure that the seed is well nurtured once it has started to grow. It needs to be kept in a sheltered location; so does your company’s data.  For many CIOs, London seems like the obvious choice when looking for a new data centre.  However, for a number of reasons, it may not be the best choice.  Businesses storing mission critical data, and public bodies or NHS Trusts storing confidential information need to be able to access this data following all eventualities.  Following the 7/7 bombings, the possibility of a major British city being incapacitated should be at the forefront of a CIO’s mind when looking for a data centre location.  Data centre space in London is also at a premium due to the lack of space available to build new sites.  Most companies will have to join a waiting list or pay over the odds for the privilege of using a data centre located in London.  
 
Data centres need electricity like plants need sunlight.  If they don’t get enough, they won’t be able to function properly.  In the UK, there is only a small margin between electricity production and consumption.  This will only get smaller, as new power stations are not being built at the same rate as old ones are being decommissioned.  There is a high possibility of ‘brownouts’ in London, which occur when there is a drop in the voltage being supplied by the electricity grid, and are caused by electricity demand exceeding the available supply.  The drain on London’s energy supply will only get more severe in the future, especially with events such as the 2012 Olympic Games taking place.

Along with sunlight and soil, seeds also need water to carry to them vital nutrients.  The closer the seed is planted to the hosepipe, the easier it is to get this water to them.  Data centres need low latency data connections to ensure that data can be accessed and backed up as quickly as possible.   One misconception is that in order to get the lowest levels of latency, the data centre must be located in London, and that sites outside of London can’t offer this. However, data centres situated outside London and near the UK’s main fibre link, such as Milton Keynes, can offer similar levels of latency as London based data centres.                       

With the recession biting and the first green shoots of recovery still deeply buried, CIOs need to think smart if they want to help their company’s shoot turn into a sapling.  By choosing a data centre that is located outside of London, CIOs can get more for less; improved security, better reliability and a faster data connection, all for a lower price than that offered by most London data centres built to a tier IV standard.