Pre-pandemic, most companies were pursuing their own programs of digital transformation and modernization of digital infrastructure. The pandemic accelerated those programs by 5 or as much as 10 years.
This in turn has accelerated the pace of business change faster than ever before. Business and IT leaders are under enormous pressure to increase agility and speed up time to market or the true Holy Grail – time to revenue.
Some of the speed bumps in the digital transformation road have been the increasing complexity and cost of IT especially with on premise infrastructure. There are also the inevitable delays associated with long lead times for procuring IT equipment which have been exacerbated by overall demand for IT equipment and supply-chain challenges.
Challenges With Lead Times
The long lead times for implementation of large-scale deployments further frustrate speed and agility. While these challenges are particularly true of corporate data centers, they can also plague wholesale colocation installations as well.
Hoping to avoid these speed bumps, some firms hopped on the “all Public Cloud bus” to increase efficiency and accelerate business goals. Yet, the cloud was not all it was promised to be for all applications and all users.
Many found the all-cloud solution led to corporations being overextended with public cloud and experiencing rising cost, security concerns and a loss of control resulting in IT sprawl.
Another Solution Baring Evaluation
So how can companies get the speed and agility of the public cloud and the control and security of proprietary equipment and environments? The most effective infrastructure solutions leverage public cloud for applications that need bursting capabilities and colocation for large, back office, steady state, mission critical workloads.
As a result, some companies are turning to Bare Metal Solutions which enable business to instantly provision enterprise class infrastructure.
Bare Metal Solutions are pre-configured servers, racked and cabled in service provider data centers waiting to be deployed by customers. Each server is a separate isolated unit, dedicated to only one single customer.
Bare Metal Solution lets IT Professionals off-load provisioning, managing compute, storage, and networking, as well as fully managed and monitored environments such as power, cooling and facilities. This approach can also avoid lengthy deployments and the ever-increasing cost of depreciating assets while at the same time, providing enterprise-grade SLAs for hardware uptime and interconnect availability.
Have your Infrastructure and Manage it too
Those opting for the Bare Metal Solution do not have to give up on control either. Many bare metal providers deploy Intelligent Platform Management Interface “IPMI” systems where customers can maintain complete control of the entire stack, from the motherboard on up while the service provider maintains the hardware as well as all the colocation and facility elements necessary to deliver the infrastructure.
This essentially allows customers to purchase “Compute power as a service.” Bare Metal Solution also comes with automation tools to help onboard environments quickly - provision applications, relational databases, configure popular operating systems and set up services such as backup and monitoring.
This allows companies to scale capacity up and down as needed without waiting for hardware to be delivered. Companies can turn CAPEX intensive models into flexible and predictable OPEX based pricing structures with unified billing across the Bare Metal Solution.
Bare Metal Solutions Service Providers
Cyxtera is an example of one service provider that provides Bare Metal Solutions. They can also provide robust, low latency, direct connections to all major cloud providers and access to a robust global ecosystem of 600+ networking technology service providers.
With 62 data centers in 29 markets, companies can spin up new computer capability closer to their customers without lead-time for hardware or implementation.
Conclusion
So, as corporate and IT Executives continue to be asked to do more with less and especially more with less time to revenue - a point, click and provision model for workload ready infrastructure has many appealing aspects.
About Cushman & Wakefield’s Global Data Center Advisory Group
Cushman & Wakefield’s Global Data Center Advisory Group is a global team of elite professionals delivering specialized real estate solutions for mission critical users, owners, and service providers within this specialized asset class. Our expertise includes colocation facilities, control centers, greenfield development, powered shells and trading floors. We lend additional value through our understanding of global dynamics and their impact on local markets.
For more information on Cushman & Wakefield’s Global Data Center Advisory Group, contact us.