Hybrid cloud is today a crucial element of corporate best practices — so much so that those who have scale and are not using a hybrid cloud strategy are falling behind.
This, however, is only the first step in an organization’s hybrid transformation. Because, in so many words, data center capacity demands it.
In Europe, the largest markets for edge datacenters are located in the so-called FLAP markets: Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris. But the explosive growth of datacenters is becoming increasingly problematic as they are digesting public infrastructure and growing out of sync with urban planning zones.
The next generation of ultra high-density datacenters, beyond the FLAP markets, are located in regions where space is plentiful and where power is abundant and cheap.
Tech giants like Facebook, Apple and Google all have significant datacenter investments in close proximity to the Arctic Circle, where they’ve built extremely efficient and high-performance compute facilities.
Vast improvements in connectivity to the Nordic region (bandwidth prices having decreased drastically over the past five years) have opened up entirely new markets to enterprises who might, like the Facebooks and Apples of the world, leverage their own Nordic data center advantage.
This new frontier in data center strategy is called “hybrid colocation.”
The world’s most innovative companies in manufacturing, tech, finance and research (to name just a few verticals) now rely on substantial IT infrastructure to run their HPC and AI workloads. It makes little economic sense, though, to perform these computations within the high-cost FLAP data center ecosystem — where connectivity runs at a premium and (for HPC, AI and other high-throughput applications) can be an extraneous and expensive luxury.
Hybrid colocation: All in the sorting
The story, in simple terms, is about putting the right workloads in the right locations. Currently, many applications that do not require low latency or multiple connectivity options are inundating FLAP data centers — and costing unnecessarily high fees.
Instead, high-throughput, CPU-intensive and AI-driven compute is best performed where high-performance computing resources are plentiful, shared and inexpensive.
This approach — sorting edge-tasks from heavy HPC and AI workloads — will deliver results like you’ve come to expect from the world’s largest tech companies. But of course, that will only be the case if you have a hybrid colocation IT solution already set up.
Nordic countries such Iceland, Sweden and Norway provide some of the world’s most HPC-friendly and AI-intensive data center environments. Power is reliable, sustainable and competitively priced. Cooling for dense racks of CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs and other hardware is abundant and often, thanks to the data center-friendly climate in the Nordic environment, free.
Which is why hybrid colocation of an organization’s HPC resources delivers increased redundancy reliability and more competitive compute, especially when that HPC is collocated in the world’s most competitive region for HPC data centers, the Nordics.
Which means perhaps you, one day, can be one of those CEOs and tech experts touting the hybrid colocation solution that completely upended your enterprise compute — and ensured your organization more compute for the budget with a powerful competitive edge.