Traditional Datacenters vs. Facilities as a Service
The rise of Facilities as a Service has threatened the traditional datacenter model. In the past, a network engineer would build out an infrastructure to support the businesses tasks using the most practical and cost efficient equipment currently available on the market. Corporations such as HP have capitalized on this opportunity by building out what they have dubbed Facilities as a Service. Large public cloud datacenters have their own proprietary versions of this approach such as Microsoft’s ITPAC. HP has taken this model a step further making it available to private enterprises on a contract basis. These modular prebuilt datacenters will come as ordered by a datacenter administrator. Instead of needing weeks or months to build out physical infrastructure, HP can have one at your office’s loading ramp in just a couple days. HP’s FaaS model essentially solves all of the problems you might encounter during a typical datacenter build out. In the past, building out a datacenter could be a several week project. With FaaS, this project could take you less than a day to implement. “Previously, organizations determining their data center sourcing strategy, had a number of options, but each had its difficulties,” mentions Rick Einhorn, VP at HP. “Now with HP Facility-as-a-Service, a new option is available that enables an organization’s CFO to switch costs from a capital to an operating expense, and provides the CIO with their own operated data center which has the flexibility to expand as the business grows.” continued Einhorn. While some engineers will miss the old days of staying up late, plugging in servers and ensuring the datacenter is being built properly, it is expected that prebuilt modular datacenters such as the ones now being sold by HP will begin to take over. Most FaaS datacenters come with a standard maintenance agreement as well as a service agreement for any type of troubleshooting, parts replacement or general assistance. Facilities as a Service presents a set of practical advantages such as being a square modular size. This allows datacenter architects to plan for build outs of additional modular units that can run alongside existing units and work together if setup as a cloud. You can add a tremendous amount of computation and storage horsepower in a small amount of time using FaaS. As soon as FaaS is connected to all of the resources needed to operate such as power and cooling, you can begin provisioning the bare metal servers inside FaaS using tools provided by Microsoft, VMware and others.
