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OUTMODED DATA CENTRE THINKING COSTING SHAREHOLDERS MILLIONS
Next Generation Data Calls for UK CIOs to Think Beyond London Locations
Newport, Wales, 12th May 2010
Next Generation Data, the UK owner and operator of NGD Europe one of the world's largest data centres, is calling on Britain's CIOs to rethink their data centre location strategies for the long-term health of their businesses and wealth of corporate shareholders. It believes more organisations looking to expand or consolidate their data centre estates should be considering the growing number of out-of-town UK locations instead of the London area.
The South Wales operator maintains far too many CIOs of UK-based organisations are needlessly squandering millions of pounds by adhering to outmoded London-centric location selection criteria based on conventional wisdom that is over twenty years old.
Simon Taylor, the company's chairman, said: "Even with the proliferation of remote diagnostics and cheap fibre connections, the rather old-fashioned justification many CIOs continue to use to their boards for maintaining expensive data centre operations in the London area revolves around convenience, that is, the need to maintain close corporate proximity to off-site servers for enabling frequent 'check-ups' by technical staff. In practice such 'check-ups' are carried out remotely and any hands-on intervention is sub-contracted to engineers located at the data centre."
Taylor estimates on space alone the 'London' approach is wasting shareholders in a FTSE 500 company more than £10 million over a typical 10 year tenancy contract. "This is before risks and hidden costs associated with business continuity are taken into account including terror attack or the disruption caused by such incidence; flood; and most of all, the diminishing availability of reliable power in the London area," he said.
Commented Steve O'Donnell, EMEA managing director and senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG): "In many parts of the world and especially in North America, large-scale data centre migration to out-of-town locations has already occurred and is widely accepted as being best practice. In the UK, city centre sites are exhausted, power is capped, choices are constrained and costs are high. As larger and higher calibre modern facilities become available well away from London, it is only a matter of time before CFOs and shareholders of UK-based companies start to insist upon less risky and more cost-effective corporate data centre location strategies.”
On the subject of physical distance and its impact on network latency, another common concern of CIOs, O’Donnell said: “Latency issues only affect real-time bank trading applications but in the large majority of cases most responses fall well within the single digit millisecond requirements of most applications, irrespective of where they are physically located. Any concern over network latency is unfounded especially as network bandwidth is now commoditised and low cost."
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