Kelly Smith, managing director of managed hosting specialist, Smartbunker looks at the role of outsourcing in the data centre

Many IT managers have come to realise that hosting public facing IT systems in-house is a significant drain on resources that often fails to produce the results they need. The resolution to these frustrations for many businesses comes with the decision to outsource server hosting to a third party data centre specialist. As demand for enterprise-class hosting services has expanded, the managed hosting sector has responded with an unprecedented level of growth and service evolution. It is becoming clear that the maturation and market acceptance of server virtualisation products is enabling managed hosts to develop new offerings that more fully match customer requirements. 

As of today, organisations that decide to outsource some or all of their servers to a managed hosting provider are presented with a number of service options. Shared hosting is the entry level. At this level, a managed hosting provider creates multiple instances of servers using virtualisation software on a single hardware platform and each instance is leased to different organisations. The provider manages all aspects of provisioning, including communication infrastructure, power management, availability and backups.

The next step up for organisations is dedicated hosting, in which each customer leases individual physical servers from the managed hosting provider. Users have complete access to server controls and are able to load and run any type of software on the server. Up until recently, a well-managed dedicated server from a reputable provider has been the ultimate level of managed hosting. However, recent developments have lead to the creation of a new level of service.

Virtualised dedicated servers are single or multiple physical servers on which, like entry-level shared servers, multiple instances of virtualised servers are created. The defining difference is that users do not share physical servers with other customers. There are many advantages of this type of virtualised service, including the ability to easily move virtual servers among the physical servers for easier hardware maintenance leading to a more reliable server infrastructure. The flexibility of virtualisation also allows organisations to scale up and down more effectively, and get more from leased hardware, with utilisation rates increasing from just 10 per cent to 80 per cent.

The introduction of virtual dedicated servers as a managed hosting option is relatively recent – six months ago it was almost unheard of.  However, the advantages are so compelling that nearly all quality managed hosting providers have now introduced (or are planning to) such a service to meet growing demand. We believe that the next logical step in the evolution of managed hosting will be an extension of the virtual dedicated server, namely the completely virtualised data centre.

De-coupling of data and systems
Though virtualised servers have entered a layer of abstraction, buyers and sellers of managed hosting services continue to phrase their dealings in terms of systems. What they do not yet do, but what we expect to see happen, is define managed hosting solely in terms of the service delivered. Managed hosting providers and their customers will de-couple the link between data, applications and systems. Organisations will no longer express what they want in terms of hardware, a physical or virtual server, but in terms of the service that they want to receive. Virtualisation is the tool that data centre innovators will use to facilitate this transition.

A data centre that fully virtualises will become incredibly flexible in its ability to deliver services on demand, as well as becoming more efficient and easier to manage. The data centre effectively becomes a single shared hosting platform. Load balancing, security and contention will be easier to manage as the operation of the entire data centre can be consolidated to a single point. The virtualised data centre will have some conceptual similarities with a mainframe computer. Mainframes are defined by their overall computational power, high utilisation rate, reliability and the fact that they can be maintained and upgraded while still in service. However, as a data centre is constructed from small computational units (single physical servers), it will be far more flexible in scale for the operator than would be the case with a single mainframe.

To successfully bring this service to market, managed hosting providers have a number of challenges to overcome. However, clients may be initially uneasy with the premise, and managed hosting providers will need to develop a metric by which they can quantify the service on offer. Electricity companies express their service to consumers in terms of kilowatt hours, but managed hosting providers will be unwilling to express their service in terms of a single metric as not all managed hosting services are equal. For example, to simplify the service to a quantity of I/O operations ignores other aspects of the service, including latency, security, and resilience. Finally, if data centres were to sell the service rather than a notion of system, they would need flexible capacity so that they can meet spikes in user demand for service.

Conclusion
For nearly all organisations, a frank appraisal of the way they provision IT services will conclude that IT would be far more efficient and effective if at least a proportion of systems were outsourced. Managed hosting services are developing very rapidly and the next significant evolutionary leap, enabled by virtualisation, is starting to come into focus. I believe that users and suppliers will soon no longer think in terms of data and systems but instead think about the utility provided by managed hosting. At that point managed hosting providers will transform their data centre into a tool for delivering utility computing to customers, completely de-coupling systems from data and application delivery.