The 550 square-meter Principality of Sealand 10 km off the coast of Suffolk. Despite an average population estimated at five, Sealand passports and stamps have been in circulation since 1969.
And, according to the Web site of HavenCo, the main'and only'business in Sealand, data can be stored on 'the world's most secure managed servers in the world's only true free market environment.' HavenCo's site claims 'unsurpassed physical security from the world, including government subpoenas and search and seizures of equipment and data.'
Naturally, this degree of data security commands a premium price. While most Hong Kong IT professionals would consider a less extreme form of data center, secure backup for data is desirable at least, and not infrequently, mission-critical.
HK data center back-story
'Hong Kong companies are extremely sophisticated'not just in doing business but also in integrating IT and harnessing it to further our business objectives,' said Peter Yeung, managing director, Hong Kong operations, Jardine OneSolution. 'I would say that we are as good as our US and European counterparts in the adoption of new technologies.'
Data centers first made their appearance in the 1980s, said Yeung. 'Service providers have had to adapt to changes even faster than business enterprises, incurring initial one-time investment costs, experiencing resource sprawl, economy of scale considerations, and start-up difficulties,' he said. 'Running a data center calls for tremendous flexibility, a keen eye for new technologies and change, as well as the foresight to tailor a wide array of value-added services that provides business advantages for your client.'
A data center is 'a place to locate computer, storage, and networking devices safely and securely which provides power redundancy, [a] temperature-controlled environment and network connectivity for your or your customer's mission-critical systems,' said Andy Mak, VP, PCCW Solutions.
Mak recalled the days when terms like 'computer room' and 'server room' were used'terms which he said had given way to 'Internet data center' (IDC) or 'enterprise data center' (EDC). However, he added that the best facility was an integrated data center that includes 'both IDC and EDC functionalities and features.'
'[A data center] should simply be viewed as an organizational component around which the mechanics of business revolve,' said Kenneth Leung, head of solutions business, Datacraft China/Hong Kong. 'From a business unit perspective, there may be a sales team and a finance group [close to] the data center, supporting their daily business processes. It may not be an organic (i.e. people-based) unit, but nevertheless a functional business sub-unit co-existing with a supporting (IT or MIS) team.'
'A secure, conditioned environment suitable for the installation of IT and communications equipment,' said Norris Hickerson, VP, data center and engineering services, COL. 'However, the scale and scope of any data center is dictated by the needs of the business.' Hickerson said his firm 'provides facilities management as well as disaster recovery services, so our data centers are quite sophisticated. We operate multiple data centers, each of which has multiple levels of infrastructure redundancy to ensure the high availability which are required by our customers.'
'If a company's business relies on IT information systems it should consider using a high standard data center, regardless of its size,' said Yeung from JOS.
When to deploy?
'Even one mission-critical application justifies the installation of equipment in a data center environment,' said Hickerson. 'Typically in any environment supporting more than one or two servers, there will be a mission-critical application'even if it is just email.'
'The key consideration for an enterprise to acquire data center services from an external outsourcing services provider is primarily to allow that enterprise to focus on its core business and expand its marketplace,' said Philip Chua, managing director, Atos Origin'whose subsidiary Sema Group was recently awarded the Hong Kong government's first outsourcing contract. 'The provision of the data center outsourcing services should then reside with an external outsourcing technology specialist which is then able to leverage its scale (both from a people and technology viewpoint) and expertise in ensuring that such services can be delivered seamlessly and efficiently. The other consideration in outsourcing such services is also to reduce its total operational costs.'
'Central management of the data center is crucial,' said Datacraft's Leung. 'The key towards maintaining an efficient data center is manageability to drive costs down yet maintaining business objectives.'
Leung added that as security threats could put business at risk, a core concern is to ensure that business data is not compromised. 'Protecting your data center is also crucial from a physical standpoint,' he said. 'Data which resides in your storage array, or server, needs to be backed up and archived and mirrored for disaster recovery'for example, email systems have become a crucial part of communications today and without it, your business is at risk of losing productivity.'
'To cope with the growth of business operations, we see a growing demand for large enterprises to build their own IDC to manage an increasing amount of data,' said Mak from PCCW Solutions, adding that his firm's data center services have extended from management services to design, build and implementation.
HK SMB data centers
What criteria should Hong Kong SMBs use to evaluate their need for a data center?
'To evaluate their need for a data center, as well as specific services their business would require from one,' said Yeung, 'SMBs can refer to the service levels definition of the data center, for example, (a) whether the business needs high availability of systems; (b) whether they need 24/7 year-round support service; (c) whether they need customer services support, etc.'
'Today, Hong Kong SMBs are running a very competitive business environment that requires more advanced technologies and more effective technology usage to assist them to maintain and expand their competitiveness in the marketplace,' said Chua from Atos Origin. 'Considerations include the role of technology in achieving better time-to-market, improving customer satisfaction, the intention to grow the business outside of Hong Kong and especially into the mainland, cost savings that may be generated and the ability, flexibility as well as the scalability offered by the service provider as the enterprise grows and expands its field of operations and market share.'
'The decisive factor for having a data center is simply the need to value business information and processes,' said Leung. 'As long as there are means to reduce costs from centrally managing hardware (infrastructure) and software (applications) that will impact the business from a revenue and survival standpoint, a data center is justified.'
'In Hong Kong, SMBs are running their business in a very tough environment without much sponsorship or assistance from the government,' said Mak. 'Most SMBs have no more than 10 employees and have dominance in the Hong Kong market [but] may not have appropriate skill-sets to run their IT systems.' Mak suggested that a one-stop solution at a reasonable TCO is their main evaluation criterion for a service provider.
Virtualizing the data center
'data center virtualization is something of a holy grail for the IT industry,' said Leung. 'As business applications get more complex and supported by a hybrid of infrastructure, the 'virtual data center' builds on and encompasses a few key concepts: a) Reduced dependency on hardware or software, b) Reusability of infrastructure, c) Transparency.'
'Within a virtual data center the ability to use the storage system in a transparent mode for storage tiering, independent of vendor, should translate into cost savings,' said Leung. 'And in terms of infrastructure reusability, employing virtual layers of OS makes hardware transparent and enables fail-over to an entirely different infrastructure.'
'For JOS, 'data center virtualization' creates an environment where virtual servers and storage resources are logically pooled and consolidated for the efficient and optimized use of consolidated resources,' said Yeung. 'A common management framework provides data center management services to this logical pool of resources. Clients automatically receive the precise amount of computing bandwidth and power, storage and data center facilities for their applications, as if they existed in a discrete and isolated environment.'
'A virtualized data center makes use of virtualization across the storage, computing and network layers, while a virtual server is a server instance that is created by a process and a hardware abstraction from a pool of available computing resources. Servers in a virtual environment look and behave exactly as their discrete counterparts,' explained Yeung.
Chua explained that his firm's virtualization strategy is 'based on the abstraction or virtualization of server, storage, and network resources in order to make them available dynamically for sharing by Information Technologies services for our customers.'
'The power of [our] strategy...lies in the integration of open virtualization solutions, controlled by automated intelligent management software, to present a coherent, yet flexible, virtual computing environment,' he said, adding that Atos Origin's strategy 'is based on open technologies and does not lock you into any specific hardware vendor.'
Data Centers in China
How will China fare in the data center space? Mak said that the HKSAR's cramped spaces and high rents make this inevitable. 'In Hong Kong,' he said, 'it is very difficult to find a suitable space to build a super data center. Most data centers are built in industrial buildings or even commercial buildings.'
Mak said these factors have driven his firm to confront 'structural shortcomings and further increase initial investment [during the] design and construction stage' in Hong Kong. But, he added, 'there are super data centers built in science parks, software parks and technology parks everywhere in China.' According to Mak, data centers in Hong Kong offer more value-added services to improve revenue per unit of floor space, while value-added services at data centers operating in China are rare.
The HKSAR government data center
Chua from Atos Origin gave his insight into how his firm won the government data center contract: 'Our technical solution provided more value in achieving the Hong Kong government objectives [including] transforming its legacy systems to newer technologies, server consolidation to streamline overall management, and real time data synchronization for disaster recovery.
Chua said that his firm's Tier 1 data center infrastructure provided confidence and security for the hosting and management of these systems, and that their scale of operations 'translates into a cost benefit to the Hong Kong government.'
We can only hope that Hong Kong's IT excellence, as it extends to data centers, will inspire IT firms both public and private to keep their data in the HKSAR without casting a covetous eye towards the ultrasecure, windswept servers of Sealand.