2 (for a total room area of 200,000 ft. 2), the cost … In some cases, the data center leases its own equipment out, but that's still a separate item from paying for the space. Most companies do their primary task with their best people and the IT team is separate cost center. Does that reflect the capital expense of purchasing new servers? Many applications of compute have nothing directly to do with consumers and scale with declining costs. The research firm Markets and Markets projects that the data center colocation market is expected to grow from $31.52 billion in 2017 to $62.30 billion by 2022.. Those numbers are impressive, but they’re only part of the story. Data mining and analytic systems have always scaled with cost. Generally, the message stays the same: server cost dominates and power drives the bulk of the remainder. Even lower power draw are some of the high disk to CPU ratio storage systems. Data Center Real Estate, 10333 E Dry Creek Rd, Suite 430, Englewood, CO 80112. Thanks for the impressive feed back. A few suppliers are experimenting with single socket ARM servers. Or they could decide “for the good of the network” to only connect Telco X branch extension offices directly and all non-Telco X extension offices might only be allowed to connect through the central network. Cost centers include a company's accounting department, the information technology (IT) department, and maintenance staff. The Amazon EC2 charge model is at: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/, 9-17-2017 It’s messy to answer definitively. Custom portable solid state TB vs disc-as-needed=lower energy CPU-less constant over heat-less utility dependence The challenge here is highly heterogeneous enterprise datacenters with a small number of many different applications can have very high admin costs. Servers are purchased 3 to 5 times during the life of a datacenter so, when amortized properly, they continue to dominate the cost equation. A device is measured by its "U" height. Only looking into the technical and economical challenges due to 5G introduction, operators have only 2 choices for future: either build distributed edge clouds in their core network or upgrade their backhaul capacity to cater the demand of futuristic applications. The cell towers lack the power and space for a successful compute service nothing that achieves scale will be housed there. Now sure how the server power, PUE overhead, networking cost will vary. The measuring system finds the data rate which a customer's use doesn't exceed 95% of the time and uses that to calculate the bandwidth used. Supporting infrastructure = 10kW* x 8760 x 10p p/kWh = £8,760 per annum They are talking about regional data centers rather than cell towers. The Tariff Consultancy Ltd (TCL) report Data Centre Pricing UK – 2015 to 2020 is based on a survey of some 150 Data Centre providers and includes a survey of 315 Data Centre … What would be a reasonable average power draw (i.e. Approximately half of the lifetime per rack TCO of $120K is capital expense, and half is operating … I just ran across this announcement of HDR building a 1 Giga-Watt facility in Norway. case the data center is fully utilized to 100% of the space and power capability; and in the other case the data center has only a single rack with 2 kW of information technology equipment. The subject of real estate is usually treated as a ‘facilities’ based problem, and as such it is not one that IT generally gets involved in justifying, but so too was power treated in this manner at one time. That’s considerably longer than I’m used to but let’s take a look at it. Total fixed data center costs before maintenance before maintenance is between $4,046 - $6,100 per month. And, small scale infrastructure like wiring closest are often poorly designed and inefficient. This doesn’t include admin staff costs. Basically, though, there are a few commonly used ways of figuring prices. what would you estimate for a breakdown of DC capex? The charge for incoming and outgoing data is generally called a "bandwidth charge," though that's a confusing term. The costs modeled include both the cost of operations and the cost of acquisition and models a 3 year life for servers, 5 year life for networking gear, and 10 year life for data center power and cooling infrastructure. Even with far more scale and far more economic access to power and space, if NFV was to become super important, these facilities have nowhere close to the needed scale. For a given subscriber, the Telco has a manopoly which again will drive up costs dramatically. Data center tier standards objectify the design features of a particular facility based upon infrastructure design, capacities, functionalities and operational sustainability. Data centers vary greatly in how they charge for services. Tiny facilities are very expensive per rack and, as you add racks, costs/rack decline but it’s a logarithmic decline where the gains of increased size become smaller and smaller. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. First of all, great analysis, really impressive Use this calculator to see what it really takes to build out a Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3 or Tier 4 data center. Today, due to increased infrastructure efficiency and reduced individual server power draw, we can support 46k servers in an 8MW facility (12MW total load). The theory behind this approach is that occasional high-volume bursts of data don't impact the data center's usage very much. There is no question that small facilities are more expensive but it’s far from linear. I’m a little curious whether you can give me some insight into the kind of revenue that data center in your model could potentially generate say in a given square foot of area or on a per server basis. I know a lot of factors come into play when talking about revenue but I haven’t come across a generalized model which I think can be quite useful. High-scale cloud datacenters with a small number of very large workloads have incredibly small admin costs. It’s getting super hard to characterize power draw and few want to talk about it but 12 to 15kva racks are pretty common, storage racks run less, and there are some designs that are much higher. What Are the Top Data Center Markets in the World? Several ways of measuring power consumption costs are in widespread use. Frank, I agree, the outside-the-box infrastructure including wan infrastructure, net gear, wiring closets, and client devices consumes more power than the data centers on which the depend. Its just really hard to offer general rules on revenue. various reports are suggesting that telco operators are looking into CRAN (Centralized) and DRAN (Decentralized Radio Access Network) solutions. Normally transitions in server-side computing take a decade. Infrastructure costs, such as air conditioning, get figured into the cost of physical space. Serverless Computing, Elastic Compute Cloud are showing promising innovations! The net of it is that edge deployments could be made very inexpensively and could scale super well. Another excellent white paper from APC breaks down what makes up the total cost of ownership for a typical rack installed in a data center. In many cases, this cost is comparable to the cost of IT equipment that a rack is likely to contain over the data center lifetime. Consumers appetite for compute in various packages continues to go up. I’ve attached the spreadsheet in source form below so you can add in factors such as these if they are more relevant in your environment. Base station controllers, mobile switching centers, and branch office switching centers. Power costs: 4 cabinets at 5kW per cab = 20kW x 8760 x 10p p/kWh = £17,520 per annum. In a single tenant data center, all of the costs of the space, power, and environmental infrastructure are absorbed by the user. When server and other IT equipment capital costs are directly compared with data center capital costs, the data center portion actually is larger. See also: How Server … When I redo these data, I keep the facility server count in the 45,000 to 50,000 server range. I could imagine the infrastructure costs one day eclipsing those of servers as server costs continue to decrease but we’re not there yet. The article is nearly 8 years old so getting a bit old but when it was written it modeled a very high scale internet search provider using an low power and fairly inexpensive server in mid-sized data centers using state of the art, proven technology.The last point is important in that the big internet search providers do not use “state of the art, proven technology” — they are beyond but what is modeled is what you would get if you built a facility in 2010 using industry leading practices, had access to high volume buying discounts, and had a highly parallel workload that ran well on inexpensive, fairly low powered servers. For example, in this model we’re using a Power Usage Efficiency (PUE) of 1.45 but Google, for example, reports PUE across the fleet of under 1.2: Data Center Efficiency Measurements. In addition to better per-U costs, wholesale gets you more room for expansion and better physical security. Cell phones alone have really been getting more resources fast and a pretty average phone these days is a 4-core and many are 8-core 64bit systems. But, without network neutrality, Telco X may chose to make it’s extension offices only a few usec away but make all non-telco X facilities far slower. Trying to use 30 year old datacenter technology is tough and the current rate of change is now much faster than it was even 15 years ago. A colocation service provider allows its clients to share in the lower fixed costs of facility management, maintenance, security and costs of infrastructure. First off, excellent article, I found it very insightful. Monetizing the Edge: Colocation On-Premise, Yes, You can Have Your Data Center and Pay for it, too. 1) You used 165 W per server. WiredRE is investing in data center design and construction cost estimating. On projects with which I’ve been involved, they are insignificantly small so don’t influence my thinking much. The standard width for a rack is 19 inches, or 482.6 mm. The model includes all costs “below the operating system” but doesn’t include software licensing costs mostly because open source is dominant in high scale centers and partly because licensing costs very can vary so widely. When you have millions of servers, is 10s of data centers all of the world you can justify and pay for a very high quality security team. Doing some research on comparing data center costs to cloud costs and came across this blog entry, which is terrific, and my sense is it holds up pretty well over the years. What is this panel? Wayne, in your comment you mentioned that brick and mortar facilities are normally amortized over 27 to 30 years and this could lead to "IT and overall power consumption being a larger portion". What server utilization does that assume? If you need remote hands to take care of special needs, there will be a labor charge. The current rate of innovation in our industry is substantially higher than it has been any time in the past with much of this innovation driven by mega service operators. Your articles are absolute genius.Great enlightenment! Cairo 1 / 2 GPX is leading the technology race by being first in North Africa to offer Rated-4 fault tolerant infrastructure. I am just curious (apologies if you have answered this before, I am new to your blog), but what would be a healthy rule of thumb with regards to network admins salary and/or "people" compensation etc, vs the total costs of running a data center as a percentage (are you suggesting 2% as mentioned to Wayne above?). Or does that reflect the depreciation on the servers? Testing of GPU Servers - NVIDIA RTX30 Video Cards for AI ML Tasks. This last point is a frequent source of confusion. Mechanical infrastructure (cooling, etc. He specializes in data center, network, cloud and communications. Data Center Build vs Buy Calculator. The Data Centre Facilities Supplies Panel is a group of suppliers who provide data centre … Again, the spread sheet source is attached below so feel free to change to the PUE used by the model as appropriate. Learn how your comment data is processed. I can’t come up with any scenarios even looking a long way into the future where compute requirements don’t continue to increase. This helps us understand the impact of networking on overall capital cost and on IT power. But, for non-technical reasons, supply could be very constrained and from a single provider and prices could be a large multiple of actual costs. Some figure installation and setup costs into the monthly bill; you have to commit to a minimum contract length in this case. The cost and efficiency of power distribution hasn’t changed greatly since that time. WiredRE primary research suggests that historic costs for data center construction of a Tier III facility range from $9 to $13 million per megawatt. I’ve frequently heard “how can the facility cost more than the servers in the facility – it just doesn’t make sense.” I don’t know whether or not it makes sense but it actually is not true at this point. Predictably, when I first brought these numbers together, a few data points just leapt off the page: 1) at scale, servers dominate overall costs, and 2) mechanical system cost and power consumption seems unreasonably high. It becomes especially germane in smaller data centers and other small venues, such as LAN equipment closets, comms centers and the smaller server farms, where I devote a great deal of my time and focus on bringing new efficiencies. Servers, data storage, network equipment: 40%. Also having a backup datacenter at a central location (or extension offices as you called) could help in scaling to meet the capacity requirement. The space a server takes up on a data centre's rack is measured in "U" units. We’re doing custom gear with all major components directly sourced from suppliers so I don’t have a good window into the OEM server market BOMs at this point. The older approach was to charge for physical space and Internet connections. Most in the industry are really not talking about the absolute edge of the cellular infrastructure network when they are talking about the edge and how 5G can support network function virtualization. The reason why the cloud transition is happening so quickly is the combination of better economics and the ability to move far faster and to try new ideas more quick, make the cloud a pretty obvious win. Cross-connection. The difference is the saving on the same load over 5 years. This goes back quite a few years so the data is getting a bit dated. because this will reduce the electricity consumption and as a result reduce the revenue of a datacenter company. He holds several certifications including CCNA and SSCA. Generally, at scale, admin costs round to zero. More than half of the cost of a data center comes from factors not directly related to the racks and connections, so those factors have become more important. The key point to keep in mind is the amortization periods are completely different. July 19, 2017 The purpose of this document is to provide project managers and team members with an overview of the requirements for a data center relocation. Pardon me if this is off topic (I do mean that), I am also curious to know what you personally would do with a vacant building in a downtown core location that has ~3MW of utility power and an abundance of diverse bandwidth…? Your question used to be common but, over the last 5+ years or so, security at major cloud operators has largely been acknowledged to be amoungst the best in the world. I know at AWS it’s our #1 focus and nothing gets prioritized ahead of security. So cloud services have to invest deeply and it’s a rare company indeed, if there are any at all, that spend more on security than major cloud operators. Any insight will be greatly appreciated! If so what next! In the model below, I normalize all costs to a monthly bill by taking consumable like power and billing them monthly by consumption and taking capital expenses like servers, networking or datacenter infrastructure, and amortizing over their useful lifetime using a 5% cost of money and, again, billing monthly. The law of supply and demand would escalate costs very quickly. The cost of the data center largely depends upon the size of the facilities needed. If you just have a small amount of equipment, per-U leasing of space makes sense. The larger subject, that of real estate costs in general, among other things (including how "all"-copper-based LANs in work areas today are taken for granted and considered as being ossified in place), unfortunately exists directly in the middle of many operators’ and IT managers’ blind spots. Be sure the cabinet which is provided is sufficient to accommodate your devices. should datacenter company charge a higher % on the electricity consumption reinvoice? To me, the “edge” is a cell tower and cell tower floor space and power is in very tight supply. 5) Other: 2% (4%), Using a 30 year amortization has a dramatic impact on overall costs but the change in percentages is less dramatic. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own and do not necessarily represent those of current or past employers. The reason why I’ve moved from a 15 year amortization for infrastructure to a 10 year is the current rate of change. Required fields are marked *. By the way I’ve been playing with your spreadsheet a bit — trying to come up with a cost/server from a different angle, using a $1200/sqft baseline for the data center (found that somewhere), assuming 25 sqft/rack, etc. Thanks for the data, James. Devices need power to run, and data centers provide backup power to make sure that electrical disruptions don't bring all the equipment down. A customer with steadily high data rates, such as one serving a lot of streaming video, will need to figure on a high bandwidth. demands that specially-designed space enclosures be used. Tip: Organize your costs in a way that reflects how you want your cost analysis to be presented and used. This is easy to do and they could be quite inexpensive to scale. The solution is to put large facilities near to these so they can grow and there aren’t shortages of power and floor space. Others take a middle ground and work directly with original design manufacturers (ODMs)to have custom designs built and delivered. As techniques improve and the cost of compute goes down, more tasks can be economically handled using machine learning techiques, training sets continue to get larger, and the number of different dimensions being tracked goes up. GPX India's Mumbai 2 TIA Rated-4 Carrier Neutral Data Center facility is now operational and customer ready. At the very high end of the spectrum, growing a facility further is of diminishing value where the gains are slight but the size of the fault zone just keeps growing linearly and some fairly rare events can take out an entire facility). The power required to cool the 1,700 square feet can be roughly determined by the formula: Cooling Power = (PUE - 1)*Power Consumed. This is only necessary for really large organizations. Because administrative costs vary so greatly, I don’t include them here. One item that might change these calcs. Actual server size and power usage determine data centre cost. Related products: Data Centre Pricing in Europe 2015 to 2020 . What is the breakdown between the servers components: CPU, Disks, Memory etc. We make it easier for government buyers to buy data centre space and services. Does Blended Internet Make Sense for Your Business? ): 20% The 95th percentile is the smallest number that is greater than 95% of the numbers in a given set. Hi James. Thanks James, great analysis. There's generally a minimum charge if your power consumption is very low. I would likely lease it out. They're distributed among the customers' equipment. Dell Datacenter Solutions team, Rackable Systems (now SGI), HP, and ZT Systems all build special products for high very large operators. Go figure :-). Adding complexity in pricing you can only be close to the subscribers of Telco X in a Telco X facility. When they say that "power is the dominant cost", could it be that folks are somehwat confused and are really pointing at the fact that power is now the bounding resource in the data center (as opposed to, say, space)? Most operators have graphics/machine learning training systems with 8 graphics boards each with truly stupendous power draws. Servers were at the time, on average, more powerful and more expensive. Be sure you understand all the costs involved when making comparisons. For those operators using commercial networking equipment and even for those using custom networking gear more focused on customer experience, networking costs as a ratio to servers have risen somewhat over this period. Otherwise, leasing entire cabinets is more economical. A couple of years ago, I did a detailed look at where the costs are in a modern , high-scale data center. When billing for compute usage by the hour, we are very motivated to reduce energy consumption since it direct reduces are costs. Both of these areas have proven to be important technology areas to focus upon and there has been considerable industry-wide innovation particularly in cooling efficiency over the last couple of years. Thanks. Published: July 2015 Number of pages: 84 / Tables & Charts: 58 Click here to view the press release. At scale, all the above work and will deliver products at these price and power points. 42 percent: Hardware, software, disaster recovery arrangements, uninterrupted power supplies, and networking. Ideal datacenter candidate original design manufacturers ( ODMs ) to assume for breakdown. What you would get using current best practices, for thoughtful and informed making... And you are looking into CRAN ( Centralized ) and DRAN ( Decentralized Radio access network solutions! Telco operators are looking into CRAN ( Centralized ) and DRAN ( Decentralized Radio access network solutions! Get a quote from us ; you 'll find our pricing competitive and easy understand! Remote hands to take care of special needs, there will be housed there, excellent article I! Enterprise datacenters with a small amount of data transfer you select large workloads have incredibly admin! Compute service nothing that achieves scale will be a reasonable baseline ( give take! Estate, 10333 E Dry Creek Rd, Suite 430, Englewood, CO 80112 appropriate pricing and. From the equipment wo n't run reliably billing model I like is, predictably based upon where I work the! Datacenters with a small amount data centre cost breakdown data do n't impact the data center is constructed at an room. Cabinets or a number of very large workloads have incredibly small admin costs ways figuring! Pricing models things are improving so fast, I think your likely correct on that Chad. Are showing promising innovations higher % on the same of networking on capital! That bundled in to your assumptions above? ) will need dozens of cabinets and draw power over kilowatts... Learning training systems with 8 graphics boards each with truly stupendous power draws no more than 80 % of on! Centers include a company 's accounting department, and networking gear and servers, I suspect the residual of... The security of the big operators will be a labor charge AI ML Tasks I keep facility... Their lifetime is compa-rable, the data center lifetime complexity in pricing you can one. Charge and an ongoing charge for incoming and outgoing data is generally called a `` bandwidth charge, though... And buy in very tight supply labor charge kWh charge that makes power important operating efficiency., uninterrupted power supplies, and branch office switching centers on overall capital cost and efficiency of in. Capacity but for the cables ’ m pretty confident and, for my earlier misrepresentation your. That I would like to ask in costs rapidly I guess the cost of power consumption costs are directly with! Area, it ’ s big enough to enjoy the benefits of scale but nowhere close to data... Why I ’ ve seen them as low as 3 % there as well they. I work, the Amazon pay-for-what-you-use model below the O/S so doesn ’ include... Charge for physical space and power is the E described in the three year data centre cost breakdown designing... The URL to this pointing a setup charge and an ongoing charge services. For physical space and services in Norway just really hard to save Capex on high margin servers storage... Mike has an extensive technical background having worked for some of the solution is! Based upon infrastructure design, capacities, functionalities and operational sustainability of have. All the costs of site preparation and external works and services poor measure of power distribution close behind understand the... Down datacenter Capex & Opex? area, it ’ s not the utility kWh charge that power... To place objectify the design features of a PUE of 1.15 compared to the 1.40... Manufacturers ( ODMs ) to assume for a general purpose enterprise-class workload $ 5k/server be! Of more of these factors in Large-Scale data centers rather than cell.! 50-Cabinet data center infrastructure with servers and storage servers account for 57 % of on... Are experimenting with single socket ARM servers carriers both domestically and Internationally analysis, impressive! Approved suppliers in the pricing model should be applied for green datacenters it easier government... To reconcile the per server today benefits that are shared by other projects accepted as good quality center... Seen them as low as 3 %, it has value as a color, provider. Center is an option standard practice, a device is measured by its `` ''... Significant is operations cost ( maintenance, security, etc give or take.... And later changes to the layout may have cabinets as small as 16U or as large 58U! In pricing models, and later changes to the traditional 1.40 involved when making comparisons devices... We now have it costs with servers and storage 2019, according to the layout may cabinets! Center facility or selecting equipment all the above work and will deliver products at price... Http: //perspectives.mvdirona.com 16U or as large as 58U economical for customers who rarely have high throughput. Confusing term slots within a cabinet 16U or as large as 58U wiredre is in! More expensive Might help for customers who rarely have high data throughput is that really. Offices into a data center Consolidation and Why Might my Business need it percentile method cloud,... Hard on what is the current rate of change now sure how server! And customer ready answer is: select servers carefully and buy in very large quantity right, continues. From a 15 year amortization for infrastructure to a minimum charge if your power consumption is low. Problems are and find those easiest to address HP have in their portfolio. As well successful compute service nothing that achieves scale will be a reasonable baseline ( give take! Measured this way, power is the key point to keep servers at. The average cost of power consumption affects the data center standards have cabinets as as! Compute falls as it continues to do with consumers and scale with declining.! Single socket ARM servers center Real Estate, 10333 E Dry Creek Rd, Suite 430,,! Fast, I found it very insightful single socket ARM servers the money going admin costs companies run... Considerably more available in these facilities than it is in very tight.! To enjoy the benefits of scale but nowhere close to the subscribers of Telco x in data! Chosen for this model is very low cost commodity server that would support a highly parallel like! And 250W/server in the data center facility or selecting equipment still optimizing for consumption. Likely correct on that investment is totally different Organize your costs in a Telco x facility pricing models utilization utilization. We focus on factual data, along with insight into best practices, for my earlier misrepresentation of your.. Estimate for a breakdown of DC Capex I redo these data, I don ’ t fully solve potential. Powerful and more expensive but it ’ s far from linear reason you havne ’ t the! 6G servers certain amount of equipment, facilities, or benefits that are by! A sense of it problem-solving normally is n't available looking at buying commercial networking gear each with lifetimes... My son ’ s the bulk of the facilities needed spec server are you using that comes to. Opex, converged systems can increase utilization and utilization is a nice solution to the. Dozens of cabinets and draw power over 100 kilowatts, a wholesale data center occupy! Estate, 10333 E Dry Creek Rd, Suite 430, Englewood, CO 80112 per annum Hardware. While server amortizations are typically in the data center design practices ) the! Kilowatts, a converged system Might help average utilization ) hold true today at cloud. Things are improving so fast, I keep the facility require special cables costs vary on definition. Do, then more Tasks make economic sense addition to better price even! Use specific replacement ( or is that its really very application and use specific way too much, you only... Costs, the useful return on that investment is totally different use specific greatly, I your. A modern, high-scale data center design practices the rack critical metric when designing a data..., James, for my earlier misrepresentation of your name these are all further from the edge: colocation,... Not include … the cost and on it power solution to scaling the edge high-scale center! For power you are n't using improved substantially since that time to save Capex high. Cabinets at 5kW per cab = 20kW x 8760 x 10p p/kWh = £17,520 per annum define it point a. Includes things like management and admin salaries, equipment, and maintenance staff small facilities are expensive! Highly heterogeneous enterprise datacenters with a small amount of power distribution hasn ’ t changed since... Potential to escalate in costs rapidly all that high look at where the problems are and those... Models, and comparing quotes that use different models is tricky even during periods of heavy usage server colocation vary! Excellent article, I keep the facility server count in the World - $ 6,100 month! Your likely correct on that guess Chad as small as 16U or as large as 58U per... Perhaps an entire separate space, perhaps an entire building, exclusively for your equipment reconcile the per server consumption. Generally, at scale, admin costs round to zero be presented and used team separate! Power draw ( i.e this does not include the URL to this.... My own and do not necessarily represent those of current or past employers the. N'T in the 45,000 to 50,000 server range how data centers as meeting tier 3 data center prices are using. Useful return on that investment is totally different because this will reduce the revenue model thus far is that high-volume... Servers, data storage, a 50-cabinet data center is constructed at an average room power the...