CIOs, CTOs and other technical leaders are a diverse group with different backgrounds and priorities. But there’s one thing that makes them alike: They all have better things to do with their time than manage a data center.
These leaders have long looked to colocation services to help offload this unwanted chore, giving them more time to focus on their core responsibilities. However, not all colocation data centers are equal. By deploying in a high-performance data center, businesses can get benefits that extend far beyond space and power. In fact, the right colocation partner can help them tackle some of the biggest business challenges they’re facing today, including these four:
- Connecting with the right partners in the right places
- Ensuring low-latency connectivity at the edge
- Preparing for AI adoption
- Meeting sustainability goals
Let’s look at each of these in more detail.
1. Ensure proximity to partners and service providers
No business can be successful working alone. This has always been the case, but it’s especially true now. Collaborating with different partners and using on-demand services from different providers has become the norm; businesses that aren’t prepared for this new reality will inevitably fall behind.
Connecting with the right partners depends on having the right infrastructure in the right locations. Many businesses recognize that colocation can help with this. Modern colocation data centers are gathering points for digital ecosystems, bringing together thousands of businesses in the same place. This is particularly true in core metros that attract high concentrations of clouds, networks, SaaS providers and enterprise partners.
In some cases, you may even be literally colocated in the same facility as your preferred partners and service providers. Your data and workloads will be able to reach those partners without even having to leave the building. This ensures low latency and predictability and helps protect your company’s vital intellectual property.
The Hero Group, a global natural food manufacturer, worked with Equinix to evolve from traditional IT to a more agile model using high-performance colocation. Among the benefits they achieved from this transformation were on-demand access to cloud services and easier connectivity with their global supply chain partners. Watch the Hero Group video below to learn more.
2. Deploy and connect all the right edge locations
Latency is a byproduct of distance, and the only way to keep latency low is to place infrastructure in proximity to data sources and end users. Enterprises know they need to deploy at the digital edge to keep distances short, move very large datasets with minimal delay and support a growing array of latency-sensitive applications.
The edge as a concept is fairly simple, but it can get very complex in practice. That’s because the edge isn’t any one specific location; every business has their own unique edge. For instance, a global manufacturer may need edge data centers in any metro where they have factories. These edge locations may not have the same concentration of cloud and network providers as the core metros mentioned above, but they’re still going to be in large cities like Detroit or Stockholm.
Companies in the mining or oil and gas industries have a completely different definition of the edge. They need to operate in remote areas that offer very poor connectivity. They may not have direct access to a colocation data center nearby, but they can still reach one via a dedicated high-performance network connection. This would allow them to access cloud providers and ecosystem partners despite the distance.
Regardless of whether your edge is in the big city or off the beaten path, choosing the right colocation partner can help. Equinix’s global data center footprint is dense enough to offer proximity to most of the world’s population. Also, for customers with remote operations, our ecosystem of network service providers can help bridge the last mile between their sites and the nearest Equinix IBX® colocation data center.
One customer that worked with Equinix to implement distributed digital infrastructure is Stadler. This global train manufacturer needed a digital presence in many different production, component and service locations across Europe and the U.S. Read the Stadler case study to learn how Equinix helped them do it.
3. Prepare for AI adoption with infrastructure that’s both powerful and flexible
Today’s AI workloads are very compute-intensive, and the size of the datasets used for model training is only going to grow. Getting the compute capacity to support those workloads—including powerful GPUs—can be difficult, especially if you try to do it yourself inside a conventional private data center. You’d need to figure out how to deploy the right hardware and back it up with advanced cooling and a reliable power supply. Even if you can do this, your data center would still be isolated, making it difficult to connect with all the partners that help fuel your AI success.
The right colocation provider can also help you ensure flexibility to support distributed AI workloads. This includes choosing different locations and infrastructure options for training and inference workloads. You can take advantage of AI applications in the cloud when it makes sense to do so, while also keeping AI datasets out of the cloud. This allows you to keep costs down and maintain control over your data.
Finally, a high-performance data center helps optimize GPU utilization. Demand for new GPUs has skyrocketed, but many companies aren’t getting the full value of their existing GPU investments. This is due to latency: GPUs often process data faster than new datasets can reach them, resulting in underutilization. A high-performance data center helps businesses access advanced network infrastructure and deploy in the right locations to minimize the distance data has to travel. Together, these capabilities help protect GPUs from all the different varieties of latency.
4. Get help meeting your sustainability goals
These days, every business has sustainability goals of some kind. I can’t remember the last time I looked at a request for proposal that didn’t include a sustainability component. Meeting these goals is another example of something that it’s essentially impossible for a business to do alone.
Every partner or service provider you work with impacts your sustainability results, for better or worse. Your suppliers’ direct emissions become your indirect emissions, also known as your Scope 3 emissions. That’s why it’s so important to work with partners that have demonstrated sustainability leadership.
If you partner with a high-performance data center provider, you can benefit from all the work that provider has already put into pursuing sustainability initiatives. At Equinix, we’ve worked hard to make our data centers both clean and efficient. This means we’re dedicated to limiting resource consumption whenever possible, while also helping to replenish the resources we do use from renewable sources.
Data center efficiency initiatives we’re pursuing include operating equipment within wider temperature ranges and using liquid cooling for high-density workloads like AI. We’re also pursuing 100% renewable energy coverage for our global data center portfolio by 2030; we reached 96% coverage during 2023.
Learn more about our sustainability strategy: Access our interactive sustainability report.
Take the next step in your data center journey
There are many benefits to deploying in a high-performance data center operated by a global colocation provider, and we’ve only scratched the surface of those benefits here. Visit Equinix today to learn more about what you could achieve without an on-premises data center slowing you down.
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