To maximize the new data center's business continuity value, Burch and his team decided to place a significant amount of distance between the new facility and Kemet's headquarters. "We felt like we had to go at least 100 miles away to avoid the types of disasters that lead to electrical substation problems -- large storms, those sorts of things," Burch says. The team ultimately fudged a little bit on its distance mandate and settled on a Columbia, S.C., location, some 90 miles away.
Beyond business continuity, Burch says the new data center was designed to fulfill another key goal: to provide a test and development center that would operate independently of the main facility. "Probably 95% of the hardware that's down there is being used for test and development instances of our applications," Burch says. "In the event of a disaster, it will just automatically convert from that role into running our production systems."
Licking latency
Another motivation for creating a new data center is to boost application responsiveness for regional employees, customers and other end users. Organizations running latency-sensitive network applications -- the kind commonly used to power shopping and travel websites, financial services, videoconferencing and content distribution -- usually like to place their applications as near to end users as possible to improve response times. By splitting a data center into two or more sites, an organization can efficiently serve users distributed across a wide region or even over multiple continents.
Dayton, Ohio-based LexisNexis, known for its legal research and workflow services, decided in 2009 to establish a colo data center in Scottsdale, Ariz., to serve customers more efficiently from a location that's relatively immune from storms, earthquakes and other natural calamities. "We wanted something that was in the western region of the U.S.," says Terry Williams, the company's vice president of managed technology services. "Location was a huge part of our decision." The company already had a data center in Dayton.
Not surprisingly, network availability and performance were essential considerations for LexisNexis as it went about choosing its new data center site. "The key thing for us is network connectivity," Williams says. "That was something that just couldn't be compromised on."
LexisNexis is hardly the only organization seeking to bring data centers closer to end users for better service, says Darin Stahl, a data center analyst at Info-Tech Research Group. "There's a definite move toward decentralization and that's helping enterprises that want to open additional data centers for one reason or another," he says.
