Elevology Blog

Choosing an enterprise cloud platform is a lot like choosing between living in an apartment building or a single-family house. Apartment living can offer conveniences and cost-savings on a month-by-month basis. Your rent pays the landlord to handle all ongoing maintenance and renovation projects — everything from fixing a leaky faucet to installing a new central A/C system. But there are restrictions that prevent you from making customizations. And a fire that breaks out in a single apartment may threaten the safety of the entire building. You have more control and autonomy with a house. You have very similar choices to consider when evaluating cloud computing services.

The first public cloud computing services that went live in the late 1990s were built on a legacy construct called a multi-tenant architecture. Their database systems were originally designed for making airline reservations, tracking customer service requests, and running financial systems. These database systems feature centralized compute, storage, and networking that served all customers. As their numbers of users grew, the multi-tenant architecture made it easy for the services to accommodate the rapid user growth.

The commoditization of infrastructure is one of the most significant developments over the last couple of decades. The growth of web-scale companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter (which collect, analyze, and extract information from a large volume of data) has influenced this commoditization of the infrastructure.

Looking back at the last couple of decades, enterprises have realized that the problems faced and solved by web-scale companies end up being problems in the enterprise after a short gestation time. Enterprises start seeing similar issues in scaling, management, and analysis of infrastructure, processes, and data. At multiple layers of the application stack, the enterprises adopt web-scale strategies to solve similar problems (Figure 1).

Where does your data center end?

It might seem like an odd question as you can probably point out the physical building or buildings that house your data center(s). But does that physical installation line up with the logic concept of the “data center” held by your business?

In June 2016, CyrusOne completed the Sterling II data center at its Northern Virginia campus. A custom facility featuring 220,000 sq ft of space and 30 MW of power, Sterling II was built from the ground up and completed in only six months, shattering all previous data center construction records.

The Sterling II facility represents a new standard in the building of enterprise-level data centers, and confirms that CyrusOne can use the streamlined engineering elements and methods used to build Sterling II to build customized, quality data centers anywhere in the continental United States, with a similarly rapid time to completion.

Applications are driving the enterprise, whether it is a relatively simple application used by millions of customers or a complex, scalable database that drives an organization's back end. These applications, and the users that count on them, expect rapid response times. In a world that demands “instant gratification,” forcing a customer, prospect, or employee to wait for a response is the kiss of death.

–George Crump, lead analyst, IT consulting firm Storage Switzerland, LLC