Could Green Hurt Co-lo? By Peter Judge

Entities Mentioned

• Doug Mohney
• Peter Judge

1. 

   I met up this week with someone who manages data center facilities and power for a large mostly-online business. I came away with a feeling that his drive to reduce his company's carbon footprint could be very bad news for co-location providers. 
   
   

   He's a lucky guy, because his company has lined up facilities and IT, so the CTO sees the power bills and has an incentive to reduce them. He also gets to compare the relative efficiency of the data centre services the company guilds in its own data centres, with what it buys in from co-lo services. 

   And he's not impressed with the co-los. Basically, they don't cut their electricity bills, because they can charge it on to customers like my friend. They don't apply the kind of investments that would reduce overall power long-term. They don't meter the electricity individual companies use, so even if you have your own servers in the facility, there's on incentive to use lower-powered ones. 

   And to cap it all, they don't even apply the reliability measures that you'd expect from a large provider, for instance in back-up power. The co-lo has enough diesel generators to power the data center during a power cut, with two spares... but in the last power cut, two of those generator failed. So my friend's money-making transactions carried on, but one more engine failure, and he'd have been losing money (and I'm sorry, I know you want to know, but I can't tell you the name of the co-lo, or my friend's business). 

   
   From his point of view, co-lo is a waste of money. He needs to lower his carbon usage - for basic cost-saving and because of legislation. He could move to a more efficient co-lo, but he's big enough to build his own, and he can make his own choices about what he needs. That part is quite important: he can look at the Uptime reliability Tiers and choose which part actually helps make his system more reliable. 
   
   

   His problem with co-lo is the very fact that it is co-lo. It involves other customers. Not all of them will want to pay for measures that increase reliability, or cut emissions, so the service you get is a common denominator. Co-lo vendors I've spoken to say the same thing: it's tricky for them to implement things like the EU Code of Conduct or Uptime Tiers to data centres - because they can only be applied to the whole building, and not all the customers want them. 
   
   

   So is co-lo really in trouble because of the move to green? I'm sure our hosts here, Verne would be quick to deny it - and Doug Mohney argues the opposite case here. 

   My friend may have the resources and the need to build his own data centres, but co-lo and other forms of outsourcing are a good option for companies that are too small to build their own facility, are in the wrong place to build one that is green (think of location for heat), or who simply don't see that as a skill they need to focus on.  

   
   

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