By Patrick Stafford

The data centre market is continuing to explode in Australia, with American company Digital Realty announcing two new projects to be built in Melbourne that are expected to add an economic benefit of more than $360 million.

The move comes after Bevan Slattery has been pushing forward with his own NextDC venture, while Dell, Amazon and HP are all working on their own projects in the country.

Yesterday, Digital Realty celebrated with Victorian IT minister Gordon Rich-Phillips the ground-breaking of the first of two new centres planned for Deer Park, which are also expected to create 200 new construction jobs.

The construction of these new centres comes during a time when businesses and individuals are using more cloud-based services than ever before, preferring to outsource their IT rather than handle it within their own headquarters.

Such a shift, experts say, has resulted in a number of different organisations believing Australia is a fertile ground for such developments – NextDC is already operating in several capital cities, with Bevan Slattery believing the thirst for data hosting has yet to be quenched.

Telsyte senior analyst Rodney Gedda told SmartCompany this morning the market is growing rapidly as companies look to increase IT outsourcing.

“There is a lot of construction right now, and the main reason for that is it that they’re catering to a market where there is a lot of demand for infrastructure as a service,” he says.

“Basically, what that means is businesses are just wanting to find ways other companies can manage their own IT infrastructure and then use that as a service.”

Gedda says he believes this is where he thinks the market is heading, where businesses lease more time on services in the form of virtual machines or other facilities, and then pay one bill instead of having to manage different pieces of infrastructure in-house.

But he also notes these data centres aren’t anywhere near the size of centres being built in countries such as the United States, where businesses like Apple and Facebook create data centres that span football field-sized areas.

“If you’re a government department you’ve got a lot of money to spend on servers and storage and so on, so it’s not a mass marketing thing like the Googles and Facebooks of the world where they provide services to consumers.”

“This market is more catering to businesses rather than consumers.”

Rich-Phillips said yesterday the project would create 200 construction jobs, and then about 450 positions once the projects are up and running.

“The investment builds in Victoria’s technology capability and adds to our state’s reputation as a natural home for data centres and a leading regional hub for ICT businesses,” he said in a statement.

Source: Smart Company

By: Lori Ann LaRocco
CNBC Sr. Talent Producer

With the U.S. economy slowly recovering, the President laid out his agenda to sparking job creation and incentivizing businesses to hire in this State of the Union Address. One of the ideas the President has recently spoken about is encouraging companies to hire domestically rather than send jobs overseas.

One of those companies heading the call for such job expansion is Iowa-based business process outsourcing (BPO) service company Caleris. Founder Rick Grewell explained how his cornhusker company is growing and fielding calls from around the world.

LL: We have been hearing a lot about the insourcing of jobs. You started your company with just 25 employees. How many employees do you have now as more companies are scaling down their workforce but still need that customer support?

SO: We now have 300 employees. That’s organic growth. No acquisitions. We have a very small sales force and we are growing more out of word of mouth than a sales campaign.

We approximately serve 70 companies. We specialize in technology companies, broadband products and providers and high end consumer electronics. High-end software products, between 80 percent of our business?

LL: How do you stay competitive with India?

SO: That’s kind the meat of it. It’s mainly labor arbitrage. While India may offer 70% savings and we offer 50% savings, the quality of the call is what wins over the customer. For example, the length of our call is 50% shorter and that 50% negates the price the savings India. First call resolution is higher as well. Based on this, our customer satisfaction is in the low 90′s while in India, the satisfaction rate is in the 50% range. That’s based on public surveys we have reviewed.

LL: Given the global economic landscape, is that providing an opportunity for your company to entice other countries to outsource to us?

SO: We support several Japanese and European suppliers. Between 8-10 companies overseas.

LL: You provide services for call centers, social media monitoring and back office support. What is growing the fastest?

SO: We’re best known for the call centers for tech support. But an area that is growing is social media monitoring. Someone needs to look at the social media uploads, images, words that are going up online.
Software can only do so much. You need a human being to monitor as well. Software can eliminate some things when it comes to photo image uploads. Software flags the image but it can’t replace a real human being.

LL: Social Media is still new, what are the emerging trends and what advice can you offer businesses in protecting their online branding and presence?

SO: Don’t assume all the uploads are legitimate. You need to monitor user generated images. Photo sharing sites are a great example. Ad agencies that have contests have to keep a close eye on the data and imagines on their sites. User generated content needs to be monitored because you can’t assume everything posted on there is on the up and up. It may be a small percentage that’s not, but you don’t want to have images on your site that will upset visitors or advertisers.

Datacom has been selected as one of just five initial panel providers for Federal Government datacentre work. This announcement comes as a result of a tender process run by the Department of Finance and Deregulation in support of the recommendations of the Gershon Review.

Datacom and Finance complete their agreement. Pictured L-R Kayelle Wiltshire (Asst Secretary), Lisa Thorburn (Datacom), John Burns (Datacom) John Sheridan (Acting Government CIO)

This panel, which will be in place for the next five years, will provide datacentre services to Australian Government FMA agencies as well as any other Federal or State Government organisations that wish to take advantage of the arrangement. Agencies buying from the panel will enter into a long-term lease on fully managed Datacentre space with extension rights.

Lisa Thorburn, Datacom’s ACT Director, said, “Datacom was delighted to help with the implementation of the Australian Government’s 2010-2025 Datacentre Strategy. As one of the largest Australasian IT services companies and with eight Datacentre in the region, Datacom is well positioned to deliver quality services to subscribers of this new panel. We have a very strong 45+ year history of providing mission critical services to our Clients in the BPO, Systems Management and Application development space. It is encouraging to have the endorsement of the Australian Government in this very critical Datacentre technology area.”

Datacom employs more than 1,200 people in Australia and 3,500 in the region. It has revenues in excess of AUS$560M.

The Datacentre Panel success further cements Datacom’s presence in Canberra which includes the provision of Outsourcing and Project services to SEWPaC, its partnership with Lockheed Martin in support of the ATO’s 24,000 internal users and numerous other project and supply contracts to ACT clients. “Our recent growth to more than 70 staff in Canberra has meant that Datacom will soon be moving to new, larger premises on Northbourne Avenue, enabling better support for our clients” said Ms Thorburn.

Gartner Highlights Four Forces to Have a Significant Impact on Data Centres During the Next Five Years

Four forces operating in the market today could result in data centre space requirements that will shrink dramatically before the decade is out, according to Gartner, Inc. The primary factors impacting data centres in a significant way during the next five years include: smarter designs, energy efficiency pressures (or green IT), the realities of high-density environments and the potential of cloud computing.

“In the world of IT everything has a cascade effect and in data centres the traditional methods of design no longer work without understanding the outside forces that will have an impact on data centre costs, size and longevity,” said David Cappuccio, managing vice president and chief of research for infrastructure at Gartner. “However, these very forces can actually work in your favour, providing the means to apply innovative designs, reduce capital costs and operating costs, increase long term scale and keep up with the business.”

Gartner recommends data centre managers who are trying to determine how to optimally design and plan for the future data centre focus on the following four factors:

Smarter Designs

Traditional methods of designing data centres were created during the mainframe era and due to high costs, many mainframes were targeted for average performance in the mid-90 percent range during production time slots. As a result, there was minimal variation in the operating temperature or power consumption during long periods of time.

Today’s data centres have many different demands on mechanical/electrical systems, depending on workload mix, function and age of equipment. New designs have taken this into account by adding different density zones for different workload types. This zone might employ directed cold air, or even in-rack cooling to support very high density workloads with minimal disruption, or impact, on the rest of the floor. Secondary zones would support steady-state applications that consume a consistent amount of power and produce manageable heat loads, while low density zones would be designed to support low power equipment (perhaps telecom and storage).

Green Pressures

Most data centre managers paid little attention to the “greening of IT” unless they were pressured into it by senior management or the public. However, as awareness has increased, there has been a constant uptick in the attention paid to energy consumption in data centres and new data centre managers take a hard look at energy efficiency in both design and execution. The development and marketing of power utilisation efficiency (PUE) by the Green Grid continues to gain ground in the market and many new data centres are being developed with specific PUE targets in mind for the energy-efficiency advantages and the public relations impact.

Conquering Density

With smarter designs and green pressures, data centre managers and designers have begun to focus on the compute density in their environments. Most data centres are woefully under utilised from a space perspective. The physical floor space may be nearing capacity, but in many cases the actual compute space within racks and servers is very poorly used, with average rack densities approaching just 60 percent worldwide.

Newer designs focus on this issue and are developed to allow optimal rack density, often approaching 85 to 90 percent on average, thus increasing the compute-per-square-metre ratio dramatically. The advent of private cloud environments and resource pooling will provide methods to enhance vertical scalability in the data centre, while at the same time improving the productivity-per-kilowatt ratio.

Cloud Computing

Data centre managers are beginning to consider the possibility of shifting nonessential workloads to a cloud provider, freeing up much needed floor space, power and cooling, which can then be focused on more critical production workloads and extending the useful life of the data centre. Shifting workloads is not new – many companies use collocation facilities as an overflow mechanism. However, with collocation the compute resource is still owned and managed by the application owner. With offloading services to the cloud, ownership and management of IT assets is shifted to the provider, essentially outsourcing the service to someone else.
As this practice increases in popularity, the landscape for what remains of the corporate data centre will change significantly. Only core business functions — those that differentiate a business from its competition, or are truly mission critical — will remain in the primary data centre. All other noncritical services will eventually migrate to external providers, having the long term effect of shrinking physical data centre requirements.

Gartner predicts that by 2018, data centre space requirements will be only 40 percent of what they are today. The focus of these data centres will be on core business services and as those services continue to demand more IT resources, the shrinking size of servers and storage (and telecom equipment) will more than offset that growth.

Source: PRWire.com.au