DEAC has been enlisted among worlds largest commercial data centers

Continuous process
A data center is a unified fault tolerant servers system, located at special technical platform with controlled environment with common efficient management system that allows to accumulate and hold different sort of data and to transfer it via internet. Hence the functions of such centers – to store and process data, to maintain webpages, to be used for providing virtual hosting, e-mail systems and other networking services. The continuity of the processes are guaranteed by engineer systems and professional personnel at the data center.

There are 3 basic services of the data center.  First, Dedicated – providing the customer with certain dedicated server configuration  for rent with access rights to the resources via internet. Then, Colocation – the customer colocates its equipment in data center with access to informational resources of the equipment via internet. And the last is VDS (Virtual Dedicated Server) – the customer rents a virtual server. That is when a certain part of the physical server with hard disk, RAM and CPU is allocated for certain customer needs.

So, data centers are required by the companies, that widely use Information Technologies and would like to improve the quality of provided services. And the companies, that value the continuity of the data processing.  Which data center to choose? In order to understand that, we need to see the development of the data center market during the last few years.

Market dynamics: positive so far
Accoring to RBK data, years 2007 and 2008 were noted as active by large data centers newcomers. The market volume was increasing by 30-50% each year. In 2008 a strong shortage of data center services was noticed. Whereas in 2009 market development slowed down due to financial crisis. A year 2010 showed market growth and stable filling of excess capacities, formed in 2009. 

Today, the market in is experiencing further development, due to some large projects, planned for 2008-2011. The head of DEAC marketing and development department – Oleg Naskidaev says, that the growing amount of large data center in is predetermined due to immaturity of this segment. The main problem, that slows its development  lies in psychology of top-managers and business owners. “Still they are very accurate in deciding about outsourcing data center services” says O. Naskidajevs.

Is there any demand?
Today demand for the main service – server equipment colocation – exceeds the offer. But the more serious problem is that often data centers do not correspond to the customer needs. For example, large corporations can not store all its IT infrastructure in a small data center.  For many companies availability and fault tolerance is crucial. Often the determinant issue is data center downtime, which can not exceed 96 minutes per year (TIER III).

Gradually the demand for services types is changing. “Modern Technologies” experts counted that in 2007 hosting made 47% of total income of commercial data centers. 53% come for Colocation and Dedicated services. In 2008 situation was pretty much the same, hosting handed 2-3%, due to higher demand for dedicated server rental.

In 2010, according to analytics, defining influence on data center market development, had higher requirements for availability level of the data centers, in order to comply with international standards. Apparently in a short term a price war is possible, when rental and additional services rates will be reduced. On the other hand, price reducing can draw many customers, that previously were orientated towards foreign hosting.

The problem of choice
So far market players unwillingly show their financial and technical information. That is why it is quite complicated for the customer to compare data center by these indicators. In order to choose the data center more properly, the specialist advise to define data center efficiency by indirect data: range of services, and their cost. Such information is shown more willingly. In order to compare by these indicators, the largest (on 2010) companies  data center operators of Moscow and St. Petersburg were chosen.

Source: Cnews magazine - #01-02 (53).
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