IFT - Infratil

[NZSilver]

I would say their main customer is government agencies - seems as though big operators Google or Amazon have their own data centres. But likes of Xero or Small buisness that don't want their own server, large private businesses etc. Seems a universal requirement for a lot of companies... Even though it's a slightly different business to there usual infrastructure investments it looks to be the goods - I must say the images of our new investment are about as boring as they get, racks of servers! However boring usually means a good investment!

[silu]

Seems like a prudent investment at first glance. Now it just needs a Pied Piper box

[macduffy]

Just to clarify my thinking.

Data centres - aka "the Cloud" ?

[silu]

Found a video about Canberra Data Centres which shows what its all about
https://youtu.be/nvyzJ1I6IGQ

[Fox]

Yes, basically lots of offsite data storage that companies can rent to store their files or use as a server.

[silu]

One of the biggest challenges in the technology sector is data storage. The ratio with which data is expanding grows literally by the minute. The companies that can master data compression, transfer, security and storage will have a license to print money. Getting more and more excited about this one.

[mondograss]

Xero is in the process of migrating to Amazon data centres. But anyone doing Healthcare IT needs to use a top-tier data center as patient data is quite tightly regulated, so you'd expect that sector to be a prime target given all the government work they presently have. Think Orion rather than Xero.

[NZSilver]

Thanks for the vid - here's a bit more I found re technology and upgrading:

Datacentre professionals should build a business case and perform a cost analysis ahead of setting up their datacentre budget. They must consider total cost of ownership rather than just capital expenses or operating expenses of running a datacentre and look for return on investment in power savings.

"Every time you change servers, you are doubling capacity and halving energy consumption," he said. Facebook's strategy is to refresh its hardware so aggressively that it doubles its capacity and avoids building new datacentres.

"But it becomes difficult for local council authorities to justify capital expenditure on hardware ever so often."

While the likes of Facebook, Google and Amazon do not set practical examples for regular datacentre managers, traditional enterprises must at least refresh datacentre more often than they are doing now, he said.

Three-year hardware refresh is one way of cutting datacentre cooling costs at a time when datacentre growth is predicted at 20% per year for the next few years. UK datacentres consume 1GW of power every year, according to Bitterlin.

UK's average annual temperature is about 9°C and the peak temperature is 33°C, so businesses need not depend on mechanical cooling devices such as the compressors all the time.

Following simple measures such as updating equipment regularly and by ensuring higher degree of server utility, datacentres' power consumption can be optimised, Bitterlin said.

"Any datacentre manager keeping their hardware for more than three years is crazy," he said.

In 2013, server equipment in IT facilities are estimated to consume 35% of their peak power even when they are idle or doing very little IT processing whereas microprocessor utilisation across the globe is under 10%.

"This is not correct. We must get the average utilisation rate high and idle power consumption rate down," he said.

The future has to change because today, transferring 2TB (terabyte) of data by a jumbo airplane is cheaper and more energy-efficient than transferring it via the network over a 27-hour timeframe running servers at high capacity, he said.

Perhaps the answer lies in photonic network in the future, Bitterlin said. A photonic (or optical) network is a communications network in which information is transmitted entirely in the form of optical or infrared transmission (IR) signals.

[Lewylewylewy]

Companies using datacentres aren't bothered if they're green. They mainly want to use them because either it's a big business run by a moron (who doesn't understand IT but has been put in charge of managing it and reads that it's good to be in "the cloud" in his IT manager monthly magazine). However there are some very good reasons for businesses to use the cloud. I wrote this article a while ago as a summary guide:

http://www.itsupportforum.net/topic/...yths-debunked/

By example, recently I put a server in the cloud because it was a new service that required massively fast internet, but only once a month. The alternative would be to get another internet connection that would have cost more and wouldn't get used for 27 days in the month.

People look for cost, reliability, fringe benefits (faster internet, site replication, better UPS, etc.) and location when looking for a cloud provider. There is a belief in the industry that one of the big providers will take over because they have massive economies of scale. By example, Microsoft azure cloud is very cheap. Very cheap. The disadvantage of azure is the support and fact that you can't physically go into the datacentre. Also there are sovereignty issues in some countries.

Hope that helps.

[NZSilver]

So Lewy, with you experience in this area, do you think it is a astute investment? Thanks in advance.