Four options for strategic planning for the deployment of IT infrastructure

Today, there are several options for deploying IT infrastructure for a business. All of them have their pluses and minuses, there is enough information about each of them of varying degrees of relevance about each. But we did not find any generalizing material on this subject, and it became interesting for us to cover the main scenarios of infrastructure deployment and compare their advantages and disadvantages.

On the one hand, new opportunities are constantly appearing in this area, and on the other, business needs can both increase and decrease, the goals and objectives of the IT infrastructure can change, so the strategy for its further development has to be analyzed and reviewed on a regular basis . In total, we identified four main options:

• Local location: server cabinet or rack in own territory;
• Colocation - the placement of its equipment in the data center;
• Dedicated - rental of physical servers in the data center;
• Public cloud - the use of cloud services.

The first implies capital expenditures, the rest - only operational. Most often, it is advisable to place it in a data center in the territory of the Russian Federation, but sometimes it makes sense to do it in another jurisdiction ... However, first things first.

The first option: local placement

We already had an article about the local server location , and we can repeat the obvious facts: the main plus of the local location is full control over the data and ease of maintenance of the IT infrastructure with qualified specialists and competent organization of their work. You can independently deploy, configure, maintain, quickly diagnose malfunctions and carry out repairs in the event of a breakdown. There is also no need to travel to the other end of the city or pay for the services of DC specialists if the equipment is located in another city. Full control of equipment, software and data is convenient primarily from the point of view of information security.

It is also worth taking into account the fact that local hosting has a positive effect on performance: local clients get a short response time when disposing of services, so if all the main services are in demand inside the only office of the company, then the scenario of local server placement remains out of competition.

However, there are also disadvantages of such a solution: the local IT infrastructure is tied to the office and when it is relocated, it will be necessary to disconnect and transport all the equipment, and redeploy the network infrastructure. The presence of remote units and employees imposes additional requirements on the bandwidth of the Internet channel, which increases operating costs.

Well, there always remains the risk of seizure of locally placed equipment by regulatory authorities both in case of real problems with them and by order of competitors. This risk can be reduced by placing in a separate room and registering a lease for another legal entity, but such a decision is not a panacea.

Among other things, you will have to spend money on a full-fledged pressurized zone with sufficient cooling, backup power and a spare communication channel, or at least a server cabinet, which is not always comfortable next to it.

Three other options, one way or another, will be relevant for frequent transfers from office to office, to ensure the mobility of the company, if necessary, constant access to services from remote offices or for remote employees.

The second option: colocation, placement of your equipment in the data center

We have already written about colocation, but it will not be superfluous to repeat the main points. Thanks to the collocation, you don’t have to deal with the reservation of communication and power channels on your own, you don’t need to think about protecting equipment from power failures, and organize Internet access with sufficient bandwidth. In addition, in the case of office relocation, you do not need to transfer server infrastructure.

The problems of this scenario begin when it becomes necessary to change the hardware configuration, as well as with any service that requires "access to the body." Equipment management will also be possible only remotely. The latency of services will depend on the parameters of access to the Internet, well, the alien territory on which your property and data are located is always potentially unsafe.

Third option: dedicated - server rental in the data center

The advantages in this scenario are the same as in the previous one - communication channel, power, cooling, UPS, Internet access, which is provided in accordance with your tariff in the data center, only the equipment will not be in your property, so remove it Raider image does not work. Direct access to it will not be so simple, but it will be possible to move the entire office at least every month.

In this case, everything depends on the pricing policy of certain data centers: it often happens that those who need equipment for up to six months are easier to rent, while in the case of long-term operation, the total rental costs may exceed the amount of the rent colocation and the equipment itself, especially when using used servers . But overall, this scenario is very similar to the previous one.

Actual offers

In order not to be unfounded, let's look at the offers of the market for collocation and server rental.

Comparative data on colocation can be represented as follows:

(The Tier 3 level of the Datacheap data center with such prices is distrusting; did anyone host them, maybe? How much is Tier 3?)

We consider further: to rent on 1dedic.ru a server with two E5-2630v3 3.2 GHz processors 16 cores with 16 GB of RAM and two terabyte disks will cost 20671 rubles a month when paid for half a year. At 1gb.ru, with a prepayment for six months, you will need to pay 19.743 rubles per month for renting two Xeon E5-2670 2.60 GHz / 8 processor cores each, two terabyte disks and 32 GB RAM.

At the same time, a used 6017R-NTF with two E5-2665 processors (8-core 20M Cache, 2.40 GHz) with 16 GB of memory plus 2 1TB drives costs 101.500 rubles, coupled with six months of colocation and such a server will pay off for half a year.

Fourth option: cloud storage

The main advantage of the public cloud is that if we don’t know what capacity we need or we know for sure that capacity needs will change unpredictably in one direction or another, it will be convenient to use a cloud service such as on-the-fly capacity allocation - “Elastic” or “stepwise” allocation of capacities.

On certain tariff plans, with a sharp increase in the load (a sharp influx of visitors, the unexpected popularity of a particular service, the habraeffect), capacity will also be allocated quickly, and the billing system can be built so that you will have to pay for computing power upon the fact of their consumption. One typical example is the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) .

Data centers domestic and foreign

Well, it’s worth separately considering the pros and cons of hosting in data centers in Russia and abroad: in recent years, the political factor has suddenly become a serious influence on the creation of foreign IT infrastructure, and now, under the threat of new sanctions, you can simply be left without equipment and data. Hosting in domestic data centers completely solves this issue, in addition, in this scenario there is no cross-border traffic, which, compared with overseas hosting, reduces network latency for internal and external clients.

However, risks remain on our territory from inspection authorities that do not exist in foreign jurisdictions (although it is worth noting that other jurisdictions may have other problems) - and the occurrence of troubles on the part of the data center is more relevant in Russia. In addition, the quality of services provided abroad is still on average higher. But most likely it will not work to use our own equipment, besides, the control of the licensed cleanliness of the solutions used is usually very strict. Well, you should not discount currency risks and the need for cross-border payments, which are quite difficult to present for offset and reimbursement in the framework of our tax and currency laws.

However, the cost of a leased server or private cloud abroad can be significantly lower, and the quality and level of service is much higher than in Russia.

conclusions

Summarizing, we dare to assume that local placement in most cases for small and medium-sized businesses remains the best solution in terms of data control. Data centers abroad should be used if the risks from the regulatory authorities and competitors are high enough, and the domestic data center is a good compromise solution if the business has a geographically distributed network of divisions.

To complete the picture, it is worth noting that there are combined scenarios, for example, the local deployment of the main infrastructure with the provision of the backup infrastructure in a public cloud. With the proper organization of the backup, this allows you to quickly restore work even in the event of a complete and irrevocable failure of the main equipment.

And what solution did you choose for yourself? What are the pitfalls met?