What’s Your Scale?

Scale, deployment on scale, scalability. We hear it all the time but what does it actually mean? When outsourcing your IT operations’ workload to a data centre, you want to ensure that you pick one with the appropriate “scale”.

Outsourcing your IT operations

Businesses that work around data centres will have no doubt heard the term scale thrown about.

It’s a common term in the enterprise tech world, but it’s all a bit vague, there’s no clear “scale 1” or “scale 2”, it’s all relative.

For those unfamiliar with the term, scale is simply the size of your operation. If you work on a smaller scale then perhaps you are handling the data of independent local businesses.

A “high-performance enterprise-scale”? That’s for data centres that handle dense and often diverse workloads for multinational or global businesses.

In between the two; now that’s quite the grey area. What side of the scale spectrum you fall on can depend on a multitude of ever changing factors.

It’s important to cover the bases though, so with a couple of prompts, we can help you work to discern the scale of your data so that you can choose the most appropriate data centre for your workload.

The Workload

Are you sending and receiving hundreds of thousands of emails in a day? Or are you simply looking to store your business CCTV footage?

Your data workload can tell you a lot about the scale that you require, be it local, international, or maybe somewhere in between. High-quality enterprise IT is important for businesses of all sizes and so finding the appropriate data centre is key.

Understanding where you sit will allow you to better understand the capabilities of the data centre that you intend to work with.

So for local business owners; don’t overspend on a multinational data centre that specialises in areas that you don’t really need.

Likewise, if you are a growing company, the data centre down the road that handles local independent businesses’ data might not cut it.

The Type Of Data

Think about the data that you collect and work with. Is it emails, videos, and a backlog of sales and transactions?

That’s something that a smaller, more locally scaled data centre can offer.

Meanwhile, large scale data centres may handle more complex workloads such as artificial intelligence applications and machine learning operations.

Get to know the workloads that you handle so that you don’t end up outsourcing your data to a centre that cannot handle or manage it.

Okay, But What About “Scalability”?

Scalability is the ability for a data centre to move up in scale and take on additional workloads without compromising on performance.

Those working in data centres should always consider scalability, especially when buying components. It’s important to ensure that data centres have scalable equipment from reliable realtors such as ETB Tech.

That way you know that if your business experiences growth you won’t have to swap out data centres straight away.

No matter the scale that you are operating on, always consider the potentiality of your workload growing. From here you can pick a data centre with the scalability to handle increasing workloads.