The traditional on-premises approach to IT infrastructure is becoming unwieldy. Colocation can help, but companies often face challenges in migrating major IT operations to a colo facility. This new service offers a simple and effective way forward.
In the hybrid world of IT, business leaders โ specifically CIOs and CFOs โ face enormous challenges to strike the right balance in their IT landscape for performance, efficiency, sustainability, security, and economics, in order to ultimately achieve optimal business results and return shareholder value.
In addition to those IT infrastructure challenges, organizations face tremendous data center facilities challenges to meet traditional real estate development goals in planning, designing, implementing, and running these facilities, as well as acquiring and retaining the high-skilled operational resources to do so. And, most critically, funding end-to-end operations for facilities has been proving to be increasingly challenging. Our HPE customers have indicated that they need a different creative model to consume their facilities in place of the extensively complex traditional one.
HPE Data Center Technology Services (HPE DCTS) followed the facts and the data to proactively assemble a solution and set of services that directly solves customer problems and enhances the customer overall experience in consuming infrastructure and services from HPE: the HPE Data Center Facility Hosting Service. The driver for the solution was to grow HPEโs end-to-end, as-a-service footprint to help customers alleviate their data center facility challenges for OpEx vs CapEx spending. We wanted to help them leverage the expertise of professional colocation facility providers (which are often Real Estate Investment Trusts [REITs]). We wanted to help businesses off-load data center management, bypassing the challenge of finding skilled labor to plan, build and operate owned facilities.
Before I dive into the many benefits of the HPE Data Center Facility Hosting Service, letโs take a deeper look at the facilities challenges that businesses are facing.
The facilities challenges of on-premises IT
Organizations are typically used to managing their critical data center facility, compute, and network infrastructure locally or at a home campus. That means that they need to have all the necessary support resources nearby, such as technical expertise, management, and funding.
However, businesses consistently face challenges in keeping up with the latest technologies, as well as the planning, building, and maintaining of data center facilities:
- Critical facilities require significant funding, usually adding to the CapEx load.
- Aging data center facilities struggle to keep up with the latest demand for higher-density power and cooling. The facilities lifecycle has lagged the IT tech-refresh cycles, which results in increasing demands on the infrastructure.
- For customer facilities that can be enhanced for higher density, increasing capacity on-site is another technical, economic and time challenge.
- With ongoing data growth, disaster recovery (DR) is a mandatory function, and to achieve it, many enterprises look for out-of-region geographic locations for data centers. This helps to achieve data diversity and resiliency to meet business goals. But most enterprises are unable to physically host DR on-premises, so they turn to off-premises solutions.
- Critical facilities require highly skilled talent to plan, design, implement, commission, and operate. Based on our research since 2020, and per data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics,1 the growth of the U.S. labor force is slowing, in part due to the retirement of the baby-boomer generation. Skilled staff can be expected to remain in short supply.
The figure below summarizes some of the facilities challenges that companies face:
Solving the facilities challenges with expert guidance from HPE
With the trend for businesses to go off-premises and migrate their workloads to everything-in-the-cloud models, they are making fewer investments in owned and self-managed, end-to-end infrastructure, from IT to facilities. That said, many companies are seeking more practical options than the public cloud, with more control over their assets, in a flexible consumption model. This hybrid cloud model is reinforced by enabling the private cloud option in hosted environments at colocation facilities.
At the same time, organizations migrating their infrastructure to a colocation facility may face challenges in transitioning their major IT operations. The HPE Data Center Facility Hosting Service helps businesses eliminate or reduce the impact of transition barriers. Most importantly, the service helps businesses to preserve their CapEx spend and consume these high-tech facilities in an OpEx model.
We guide you at every stage of your facilities initiative, from assessment to decommission โ see the image below.
Here are some examples of how we have helped customers address their facilities challenges with a casual, no-commitment, consultative approach:
Customer Challenge/Barrier/Concern | How HPE delivered the solution |
Remote location, lack of on-site resources ยท Limited sysadmin staff presence, reduced infrastructure access ยท Depend on outsourced 3rd party contractors for local tasks ยท Additional effort required to ensure good quality control ยท Shipping/receiving, materials handling to customer space | HPE Data Center Facility Hosting readiness assessment and roadmap - HPE established a Colocation PMO team to provide remote support 24/7 - Leverage the colocation provider smart hands |
Need for detailed site planning, remote implementation ยท At colocation facility customer must make detailed and complete plans for proper execution. Less chance for repeated corrections ยท Work must be organized for streamlined execution ยท Organize hardware functional layout ยท Capacity planning, simulate and model IT hardware space and power and cooling requirements more closely to provide accurate forecasts for project planning ยท Network services ยท Customers establish new network presence, connect to corporate assets and public cloud ยท Coordinate telecommunication carrier connectivity | Integrated design of the IT hardware solution and of the data center colocation facility - HPE DCTS collects hardware requirements from Hybrid IT and other BUs for proper inventory capture - DCTS obtains and coordinates space and power based on HPE Power Advisor tool output - DCTS coordinates and provides the entire facility plan to capture for proper implementation - DCTS coordinates network cross-connectivity to WAN/Telco access |
On-site implementation ยท Customer difficulty to implement site remotely ยท Materials specification ยท Workforce coordination ยท Project management | Integrated deployment where HPE takes care of synchronizing all the parties involved - HPE includes all data center facility infrastructure to be performed by 3rd parties with HPE oversight and QA/QC |
Data Center Facility Management ยท Customer challenged to manage facility remotely | Integrated capacity management and SLA analysis - HPE established a Colocation PMO team to provide 24/7 support to represent customer needs and coordinate all parties |
Terminate contract and decommission facility ยท Customer has difficulty planning equipment retiring, data migration and facility contract termination | Integrated decommission and exit - HPE built in time in the lease contract so that at contract expiration, HPE handles facility decommission and return to provider |
The HPE Data Center Facility Hosting Service helps customers solve a wide range of tactical and direct challenges. By strategically partnering across various HPE business units, we enable our end-to-end services to be sold and delivered under a single offering. But the ultimate benefit for you is that we deliver an exceptional customer experience and customer satisfaction. Iโll come back to that topic in my next blog, where Iโll explain how we work with you and how we help you meet your business goals.
Learn more about data center consulting services from HPE.
Read more about HPE Pointnext Services and how we help you navigate whatโs next.
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1. US Bureau of Labor Statistics: Projections of the Labor Force to 2050: A Visual Essay
Omar N Elissa
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
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Omar_Elissa
I am a Distinguished Technologist and Worldwide Technology Infrastructure Practice Principal with HPE GreenLake Cloud Services, Data Center Facilities. I'm a 25-year veteran of the critical facilities industry, with a focus on technology, infrastructure, data centers, and delivering engineering services as a project lead. I've worked on more than 160 major projects totaling around 20 million square feet of data processing critical facilities space.
