July 15, 2021
The old adage about not wanting to keep your eggs all in one basket is becoming clear as a best practice for Enterprise data centers, as well as those smaller companies and entities who are testing the waters on data center colocation services.
The main ideas here are twofold. Data centers that are actually located near where employees and companies or branches/divisions of organizations are located have reduced latency to deal with in terms of performance. And, should a natural disaster such as a flood or an earthquake or a tornado strike, only the data center in the vicinity of the disaster will be affected – with other data centers still capable of holding the data and SaaS for the organization for emergency access.
Geo-Diversity for Data Centers Increases Speed and Disaster Preparedness
As this Data Center Frontier article reports, research is encouraging geo-diversity for data centers due to growing data demands and increased Internet activity, everywhere.
“One of the benefits of a geo-diverse strategy is that is shortens the distance that your data must travel, and accordingly, the time it takes the data to reach its destination. Data speeds are crucial for today’s businesses. According to an Akami Technology study cited in the report, ‘a delay as small as 100 milliseconds can plummet e-commerce conversion rates by as much as seven percent’…The report also notes that disaster recovery is a core benefit of geo diversity. The report states that ‘for keeping your data and systems safe from natural disasters and other threats, experts recommend a spacing of 50-100 miles between data centers in your geographically dispersed data center network.’ But this can create latency replication issues unless the dispersed data center locations have a fast and dependable network. This is why you must make sure your geo-diverse partner has strong high speed fiber connections – data moves faster through fiber optic cables than copper.”
The article also explains how geographically diverse data centers can help to defeat cyber-security threats. Good news all around! As data center services consultants since 1996, we feel this is a smart strategy that can be very proactive for certain organizations. Altus offers data center migrations and relocation services and will be happy to discuss this strategy with you as a valued customer and partner. Contact us here to get the conversation started.
Please read the full Data Center Frontier article here.
