Outsourcing HPC to maintain your competitive business advantage
By: Greg Rusu, General Manager, Public Cloud, PEER 1 Hosting
For companies that produce and analyze vast quantities of data to power their business, High Performance Computing (HPC) is no longer a nice-to-have, it’s a must. Offering as much as twenty times the performance of normal servers, HPC has streamlined computing tasks, in many cases shrinking project deliverable times from weeks or months to just hours or days – a competitive advantage companies can’t afford to lose in this challenging economic environment.
Having a flexible IT infrastructure and computing capabilities are the keys to realizing significant competitive advantages in today’s market. Data volumes are not decreasing – in fact they are on the rise and getting bigger. One of today’s growing pain points in IT is that many companies have outgrown their data centre space and resources allocated to HPC; and adding more can be costly – not only are they expensive to purchase, they consume three to four times as much power as a normal server and generate several times the amount of heat. Not to mention they can take months, even years, to implement.
Despite the importance of HPC, many CIO’s find themselves locked in budget battles and arguments over IT and business priorities when trying to support evolving HPC needs with additional computer resources and headcount. To overcome this challenge and keep their businesses as agile as possible, leading companies are streamlining their HPC growth through strategic outsourcing.
While outsourced HPC was once considered hallowed ground, new HPC private cloud solutions provide the benefits of a traditional outsourced service with the IP protection, security, flexibility, and speed CIOs require for their HPC initiatives. As a result, CIOs now outsource HPC just as they outsource other core portions of their business. They view HPC in the same manner as outsourced Microsoft Exchange email, CRM applications, and product development.
Rather than waiting weeks or months for project approval and to acquire the necessary hardware and software, an organization can utilize HPC cloud services to instantly initiate any size project within days. The reasonable cost and on-demand nature of HPC, even at an extremely high scale, means that IT teams no longer need to predict their HPC needs or battle to decide which projects should take priority. When requests come to IT from engineers, scientists, and others working on the next “hot” initiative, IT responds as an enabler rather than a roadblock.
The move to outsourcing HPC to the cloud has opened the floodgates of innovation. Instead of long project delays caused by wrangling, leading companies are now seizing on new market opportunities with superior agility and setting themselves apart from the competition, while gaining responsiveness to business needs, saving time and money.
Benefits of Outsourcing HPC Infrastructure
• Security: Look for a provider that offers a single-tenant solution. If your data never leaves a host’s network you can be certain it’s protected at every crucial point by multiple layers of security.
• Flexibility: HPC doesn’t need to run all the time like a web server. Use only what you need, when you need. Scale up infrastructure during peak workload periods and scale down to save costs during lower workload periods.
• Agility: Infrastructure can be up and running in a matter of minutes or days, not months or years, transforming IT from a roadblock to a business enabler.
• Savings: Save on the cost of running and maintaining an in-house data centre, from space to infrastructure, system administration and energy costs.
• Time: Outsourcing HPC means organizations can spend less time on HPC infrastructure needs and more time on their core competencies and winning business.
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