DCaaS enables institutions to consume data center resources “as a service.” Construction and maintenance, service availability (such as uninterruptible power supply and redundant internet connectivity), hardware installation, vendor negotiation and relationship management can all be handled by the DCaaS provider. Everything that you'd expect a data center and networking team to deliver to the operating system and application teams can be part of a DCaaS offering.
With DCaaS, the capital and operational burden of owning and managing servers is placed on a third-party provider. Physical security, utilities, hardware procurement, installation and ongoing maintenance shift to the service provider, who handles all of this for a subscription fee. In theory, IT teams can scale up or down quickly — in weeks rather than months — with the complexity of meeting these needs pushed to the service provider.
DCaaS stops at the hardware and networking layer. Institutions still have to supply their own operating systems and applications, just as they would in an on-premises data center. But with DCaaS, IT teams have the predictability and control they want from on-premises computing with a dramatically lower operational cost.
DCaaS With IaaS, PaaS and Colocation in the Context of Higher Education
To understand where DCaaS fits, it's useful to compare it with common offerings on either side of the spectrum: IaaS, PaaS and colocation.
More primitive and more basic than DCaaS, colocation is little more than a real estate deal. With colocation, a service provider rents space in their facility to the institution. Power infrastructure and data center cooling systems are part of that space — perhaps metered — but everything else is the institution's responsibility. They buy and maintain the hardware, including servers, storage and networking. They install it in the space and oversee every aspect of keeping things alive and happy. Colocation is simply putting your stuff in someone else's room.
For IT teams that have always run their own data centers, colocation is an extension of the operating style they're used to, with lower Internet costs and a different real estate and utility model. Traditional problems — such as low scalability and the headaches of selecting, buying, integrating and maintaining hardware — still remain.
Colocation was extremely popular when internet services were very expensive, and it still has advantages and plenty of use cases. But for large institutions, colocation doesn't offer the advantages of DCaaS, which trades the capital and operational costs of a data center — all of them — for a subscription fee. If you have an existing colocation facility full of equipment, shifting to DCaaS should be on the table, especially as equipment ages out and needs to be replaced.
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IaaS and PaaS are distinct from DCaaS. While with both services, the institution still rents servers, storage and networking, IaaS and PaaS are completely virtualized: The underlying hardware, network and everything else about IaaS and PaaS is a question of software partitioning. The service provider manages every layer, up to the platform or operating system, with accompanying restrictions and limitations.
With IaaS and PaaS, you can scale up as high and as fast as you want — usually, in a matter of minutes or even seconds — but only if what you want is what the IaaS/PaaS provider offers. IaaS and PaaS are great when applications are designed for those environments, with minimal hardware dependencies, following templated models designed to handle general computing needs.
Most higher ed IT teams are already moving applications to IaaS and PaaS as quickly as they can. Where there's a clear mandate to shut down or downsize existing data centers, DCaaS can act as a bridge to gain some of the advantages of outsourcing for applications that don't translate to IaaS and PaaS environments.
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