Protecting data, as well as utilising it, is fundamental to business success

High-performance computing is no longer exclusively the domain of the conglomerate or mega-corporation, with estimates showing that by 2020, analytics, database and IoT workloads will account for 22% of total business workloads.

With such a vast amount of information processed online, businesses are placing higher demands on their servers and IT resources, and increasingly looking to third-party data centers to support continuous growth and enhance productivity.

Until recently, corporate server rooms have traditionally been located on-site.

However, as more and more companies experience increasing demands on resources, the limitations of server rooms have resulted in a shift away from on-premises hosting, and a move to data centers to ease efficiency woes.

The workload involved in maintaining your own server room is a major drawback to many businesses, and the costs of investing in and managing on-site servers can be significant.

Keeping your network-local presents a major challenge to expanding businesses who require offsite networking capabilities, and other limitations in terms of physical space requirements, scalability to support growth, and maintaining ageing and depreciating hardware assets have seen businesses move away from on-site hosting.

For industries such as banking and education, where large amounts of sensitive data are constantly being generated, the efficiency and security offered by data centers make them the natural choice.

However, when choosing a third-party data center, keep in mind that not all data centers are created equal.

There is a real opportunity for businesses to gain significant competitive advantages through high-performance computing.

High-density data centers can provide serious efficiency gains without an equally high price tag.

With computer processing trends suggesting that processing power will double each year for the foreseeable future, the capabilities of older, lower density data centers can quickly become stretched.

Many of these data centers were designed to support power consumption, measured in kilowatts, of between 2 to 5kW per cabinet. This presents a challenge for lower density data centers when scaling up, as they require more physical space to support additional racks and can quickly grow unmanageably large.

When factoring in the additional expenditure of supplemental cooling requirements, higher costs of real estate, and greater operational costs, low-density data centers run the risk of becoming financially unviable. 

Today, the amount of data a centre is able to support is determined by density.

By increasing the available kW per cabinet, high-density data centers are able to provide the greater performance to clients without needing to take up additional space. High-density server racks are more expensive than low-density ones, but the savings in real estate and overall operational costs generally offset the additional expense, make high-density data centers the more financially stable option.

While data and data centers may not be something most give much thought to, they are the framework on which many businesses are built.

In a digital world, server downtime can have far-reaching consequences – everything from automatic payments, student work submission and communication through email and other digital platforms can be impacted, while customer satisfaction and business reputation can be negatively affected.

The risks to businesses when data isn't properly secured are greater than ever before, with legislation around data breach notifications introduced in February 2018.

This legislation includes civil penalties of up to $340,000 for individuals and up to $1.7 million for businesses, along with the payment of compensation for damages or other remedies, for those who fail to correctly notify affected customers of any data breaches involving their personal information that might result in serious harm.

Interactive's high-density data centers are supposedly built for serious computing power.

Featuring the latest in technology, power and environmental systems, their data centers have an uptime rating across the floor space of 99.98%, with an actual DC uptime of 100%, supposedly providing virtually uninterruptible performance.