What’s hot in data centres? We ask Zettagrid

What hosting or data centre services do you provide?

We provide IaaS using our own platform, however, behind the scenes in VMware, Microsoft, Veeam, Pernix, F5, Zerto, Trend, Dell Juniper, Brocade and EMC. We also provide point-to-point fibre, MPLS and internet into our cloud using Telstra Wholesale, Vocus, Megaport, Cinenet and AAPT.

Where are your data centres located?

We are in NextDC B1, M1 and P1, Globalswitch and mutliple Vocus data centres.

When did your company first get involved in this area?

We’ve been providing IaaS since mid-2010, however, we’ve been providing networking and collaboration services since 1996

What are your credentials around hosting data centre services?

We have attained VMware Hybrid Cloud Provider and VMware IaaS Provider status. We have two VMware vChampions on staff. We have recently reached ISO9001 for our management systems.

Have you heard about any interesting trends in this space lately?

Analytics is a really interesting trend. Partners want the same visibility they had when they managed the on-premise tin, now they want to present that same information to their customers. Secondly, partners want to self-provision internet or inter-capital data just like they do with compute and storage.

Can you tell us about a recent deployment you have been involved in?

A partner recently completed deployment of a real-time disaster recovery environment into ZettaGrid. The small end-customer wanted to use 20 core VMs (100GB RAM, 3TB storage, 100Ghz) but required those to be available within five seconds if they had an on-premise outage. 

What is driving customers' uptake around these services?

We see three drivers: flexibility (add and remove costs to match their own revenues); opportunity (I’m in a refresh cycle and want to try an opex model) and service improvement (before I could deliver X standard but with this cloud I can do X and Y for the same cost).

Data centres are… ?

Where the future of computing will live. We’ve seen the trends of mainframes, client server and now the cloud. The latest model dictates that highly available and highly connected locations are required to deliver on the promise of cloud. Data centres are the core part of delivering this future.