Some things are better done collectively - these are often public utilities. Creating a road network that stretches across the land so that anybody can get anywhere is not a project that benefits from several corporations vying for customers - just imagine if two highways went to the same location, charged tolls, and you had to get out and walk to get to your grandmother's house because it didn't make business sense to route a road to her town. Water and electricity are similar services. Everybody needs to be able to use the water collectively so that the entire community can benefit equally. Well, Quality Technology Services (QTS) argues that data centers are the same way. The highest quality digital services can only be provided to large groups of people and organizations, because data centers scale extremely well.
It used to be that back in the day each company had their own IT departments, and each IT department had everything necessary to run the computing resources for that company - servers, technicians, backup generators - the whole lot. Each company spent a significant percentage of their budgets on this department, for better or worse. While in many cases this is still true, QTS offers a better way. They advocate for companies to share in a digital ecosystem, to outsource their computing needs to one huge data center in order to save money and time. QTS argues that the best data center service imaginable is only possible at extremely large sizes. This is possible due to recent advances in data center technologies.
Share and Share Alike
"Businesses use only 20% of their computing capacity on a busy day," explains Brian Johston, CTO of QTS. "But they are still paying for the 80% of the computing resources that they are not using. And businesses aren't sharing their resources. They have so much capacity but they aren't using it." Most businesses aren't equipped or prepared to share their computing resources, but QTS is. Their centralized data center can provide only the computing power that a company needs in order to perform its business, and is prepared to only charge them for the amount that they used. Much like an electric company, the Atlanta site of QTS is standing by to provide enough power to feed tens of thousands of businesses a day, and charges each one for the amount they use. It is a much more efficient use of resources.
Companies enjoy the backing of an almost infinite supply of computing resources and expertise. Whether they are small companies who just need a place to stick a few databases and a web site, or large organizations that are completely dependent on their business processes being available 24/7/365, QTS is there for them. The company compares their different computing offerings to a food court. One lone restaurant cannot hope to satisfy large groups of people 100% of the time, but a food court with its myriad of selections can probably satisfy everybody somehow. In the same way, QTS can offer the expertise necessary to take care of every single type of computing, because they have experience in that field. In previous decades, if one company depended on the expertise of one or two key technology people, and those people left the company, the company was out of luck. But with QTS offering its expertise as a commodity to any company, that unfortunate event no longer has to occur.
Economy of Scale
There are also advantages to being huge that QTS can use. The QTS Atlanta Metro Data Center, for instance, is housed in a 1 million square foot facility that used to be product storage for the Sears catalog company. It takes surprisingly little staff to care for servers in that much area. Also in one concentrated space, the pumps, chillers, power supply, and other necessary data systems cost less in total than an equal number of small facilities would cost, scattered around the countryside. Unless your company is Google or Amazon.com, you will not be able to take advantage of these cost savings with your own facilities. But you can rent as much or as little of QTS's site as you desire.
Regulation Satisfaction
You can benefit from the experience that comes from hosting the data of hundreds of companies. One of the rising costs of computing is complying with regulations about data - the data of customers, of patients, of government contracts. It can be a hassle for a new company to break into a heavily regulated computing sector entirely on their own. However, working with QTS, the company can be rest assured that QTS can handle all of the many regulation requirements. "When healthcare companies see how well we support the companies they interact with," said one QTS official, "they begin to have interest in our data centers too. When they review services that our audit and control group offers to support their growing compliance needs, that interest perks up even more." If your industry has heavy regulation requirements, working with an outside computing vendor such as QTS can be the edge you need to be successful in your first few years.
Green Computing
Last but not least, offering huge computing centers such as the one in Atlanta is actually better for the environment. With a large facility and the time and money to devote to the task, QTS Atlanta has done a lot of work to reduce their energy consumption. For instance, they use T8 tubelights, which are the most efficient type of lighting to use. Office space in the facility consumes only 1% of the total energy used by them. The company has hired independent energy consultants in order to get more perspectives on their energy usage, but these consultants have often been surprised that many if not all best practices are already in place. Efficiency is most definitely the name of the game with QTS. They take it seriously.
