Hewlett-Packard is selling its data centre services in a new way, via a programme it calls “facilities as a service,” or FaaS.
Businesses today either build their own data centre or lease space at a colocation facility. HP is offering a middle approach.
HP will build a data centre, complete with all the power and environmental systems, to customer specs, and wherever the customer wants it. HP will maintain ownership of the data centre, unless the customer eventually decides to buy it.
But even though HP maintains ownership, it insist that the facility is thoroughly the customer’s data centre. The customer will have operational control of the facility, and install whatever equipment they want, from any vendor.
“It’s your environment,” said Rick Einhorn, vice president of worldwide data centre consulting at HP. The customer is “essentially owning the data centre.”
HP argues that its new service removes the high upfront cost of building a facility. The offering is aimed businesses that want or need to maintain control of their own facilities, and not be dependent on a co-location provider.
Sophia Vargas, an analyst at Forrester, said the majority of enterprise infrastructure is still owned and operated in enterprise facilities, not in colocation data centres or cloud environments. Businesses want to maintain control over the facility and environmental conditions, she said.
“I think there will definitely be some demand for it,” said Vargas of HP’s offering, which she believes is a new approach for the data centre market. Vargas said HP’s offers an alternative and more flexible way to pay for a data centre by shifting some of the costs to an operational model.
Exactly how the cost will work out is not clear, but part of the equation will include an assessment of risk involved with building a new data centre, and under this model, HP takes on the risk, she said.
Patrick Thibodeau, Computerworld
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