How Running A Data Centre Makes Office Space More Expensive

There are lots of reasons for outsourcing your data centre, including improving disaster recovery and ensuring access to power. Here’s another reason: if your data centre is on site, your overall rental bill is likely to be higher.

Data centre picture from Shutterstock

A blog post from David McEwen from real estate firm Colliers International highlights the issue:

While these specialised environments are usually small in comparison with the total tenancy (generally less than 4 per cent of the space), they can consume over 50 per cent of the office’s total energy, requiring high capacity air conditioning and sophisticated power protection. As a result, they are expensive to fit out, run and relocate. Fit out costs for a computer room range between five and 20 times the cost per square metre compared with the remainder of an office work place. In Sydney, rent and outgoings in premium buildings are generally 20-30 per cent more expensive than A Grade buildings in an equivalent area. Some tenants are forced unnecessarily into premium buildings to ensure the base building power and air conditioning services on which their computer rooms depend have appropriate levels of capacity and reliability.

McEwen suggests three familiar solutions to the problem: build a standalone data centre (in a less expensive location), rent space in a dedicated facility, or shift to a cloud model. What works for your business will vary. However, remembering to examine the impact of data centre costs on overall business expenses is a sensible step.

Colliers


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