Are Enterprise Data Centers at Capacity an Opportunity?

• By Liam Eagle on December 15, 2008

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Posted today on the PC Magazine website was a story about a new consulting service from Dell, through which the hardware company seeks to help customers find the "hidden data center."

It's actually kind of a confusing read, until you figure out that it's this Dell press release from two weeks ago, pretty much word-for-word, with the bullet points taken out. So maybe I'll steer you over to read that instead.

Anyhow, it turns out the hidden data center isn't all that well hidden. More like camouflaged, really. See, it's in their data center.

Dell's new Data Center Optimization Services basically help customers apply a lot technology and "best practices" in an effort to get more out of their existing data center infrastructure.

It's not exactly web hosting news for a couple of reasons. First of which is that the services is pretty obviously aimed at enterprise customers operating their own data centers. If you're a hosting company big enough to be operating your own data center, you're probably already spending enough time thinking about squeezing every inch of opportunity and efficiency out of it. And I don't want to point any fingers, but if you're a web hosting company that needs to spend $25,000 for an "Energy Smart Data Center Assessment" from Dell, that's probably going to come up in your data center manager's performance review.

More than anything, this bit of (two-week-old) news related to web hosting to me because of the following quote, from Dell's VP of power and infrastructure solutions Dr. Albert Esser, in the press release:

"A majority of data centers were built during the dot-com boom and are reaching their 10-year lifespan, so it's no surprise that many companies are hitting a wall when it comes to data center capacity. Dell is helping businesses address this challenge in a cost-effective way by enabling them to get more out of their existing data center environment."

Always opportunistic, folks in the hosting business seem to be able to spin just about anything into an argument for outsourcing. Economic downturn? Outsource that data center. Looking for more energy efficient services? Outsource. Security questions? Outsource. And hey, have you heard about "cloud computing?"

So the idea that a lot of early-era data centers are at capacity today ought to have the really opportunistic in the web hosting community salivating. But I'd be surprised if this is the first time most of you have considered this argument for outsourcing.

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