In my last column, I used my quantum computing crystal ball to help prognosticate on 2015 developments. In thinking further about this year’s data center trends, every week seems to bring a new crop of announcements of hyperscale projects with supersized facilities that are measured in hundreds of thousands of sq ft and budgets that are expressed in hundreds of millions of dollars (in some cases near or over a billion dollars). There is no doubt that this trend is not new and is here to stay, since the primary forces driving these mega-centers are fed by seemingly endless market demand for more capacity and greater cost-effectiveness based on scale. Moreover, the move toward colocation providers and cloud computing has become a means of escaping from the capital cost and operational responsibility of a data center, especially if it is not a core business (and in some case even if it is), and has focused even more attention on total cost of ownership (TCO).
At the moment the ongoing price wars to gain market share by the giant cloud service providers are artificially suppressing or masking the true underlying cost their offerings. However, how actual build costs and operational cost-effectiveness of colocation and traditional enterprise data centers are calculated is another matter. When done properly TCO should include everything, starting with the relatively easy to quantify direct capital costs such as the land, building shell, and its basic power and cooling infrastructure and related systems, as well as the upfront cost of capital and its net future value. Then there are the recurring costs such as personnel, maintenance costs, equipment depreciation, network bandwidth, etc. Moreover, there is the proverbial elephant in the whitespace — energy costs — which can range from 2.5 to 25 cents per kWh in the United States, as well as the site PUE (which makes me wonder — what is the floor tile rating to support an elephant?).