According to Gartner, U.S. Data Centers: The Calm Before the Storm (ID G00151687), “the US data center collocation market will grow rapidly during the next few years and should be considered as an alternative to internal data centers.”

Forrester research finds in its white paper Collocation Buyers Are in For Sticker Shock, “Diverse requirements are driving up demand for collocation space… allowing providers to be selective”

In this uncertain environment, companies are succeeding by:

• Building strategies for the short (1yr), mid (3yr) and long-term (5yr) horizons in order to move rapidly when opportunities arise
• Modeling power, cooling and space capacity to maintain an optimal balance
• Monitoring energy consumption and maximizing million instructions processed per kilowatt (MIP/KW)
• Exploring virtualization and dynamic workload management to improve asset utilization
• Committing to managing a hardware life cycle that takes advantage of hardware efficiencies

In this environment of uncertainty, successful data center management is opportunistically consolidating data centers to reduce costs and expanding as warranted to hedge against future volatility. Prepared companies are using collocation facilities and data centers as a tactical advantage over the competition

As an example of success, one client was able to reduce their collocation and IP network traffic costs by $1.2 million per year by consolidating their multiple data centers single foot print into a lower cost, high density facility. The cost of collocation space and network traffic are dynamic. Annual contract reviews can allow IT Directors add to the corporate bottom line by renegotiating or changing providers.