What is a data center?

There are different types of data centers, each with different customers and different focus. Dutch data centers can roughly be divided into three subtypes:

Regional and national colocation data centers

Wherever you are in the Netherlands, you can always find a professional colocation data center within a maximum of 30 minutes. Data centers are located all over the Netherlands and offer local businesses and governments a platform to run their business-critical systems, store their data and facilitate their services. Some data center providers can be found in one province with one or more facilities, while other data center operators can be found in several locations in the Netherlands.

International colocation data centers

While regional and national data centers mainly focus on national parties, international data centers position themselves as the place to distribute online services in Europe: the Digital Gateway to Europe; the Netherlands – the Amsterdam data hub in particular – serves as an ideal launching pad to the rest of digital Europe. The central location, open economy and above all the excellent connectivity and the various Internet Exchanges have now made the Netherlands the largest data center hub in Europe. Many of these data centers can be found in the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area (MRA).

Hyperscale data centers

Hyperscales are gigantic single-tenant data centers, built by and for globally operating internet companies such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon. Hyperscalers are built in places where the costs are low, where there is sufficient supply of green electricity and where heat exchange is possible. The Netherlands is rich in hyperscalers, which can be found in particular in Middenmeer (Noord Holland Noord) and Eemshaven (Groningen).

Multi-tenant or colocation data centers, provide IT space and services to three types of customers in a professional manner:

Hosting and cloud providers

Hosting and cloud providers offer digital infrastructure and a platform for services to third parties. Customers can be end customers of Software-as-a-Service proviers (SaaS), such as accounting program Exact, WeTransfer and payment services such as Adyen and Mollie. Furthermore, popular services are Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), offering computer-physical or more often virtual machines, and Platform as a Service (PaaS), which customers use for the development, execution and management of applications, without having to think about the complexity of building and maintaining the infrastructure that is usually associated with it.

SaaS providers

SaaS stands for Software as a Service and is also called “on-demand software”. Examples are Google docs or WordPress, but also Exact, WeTransfer, Adyen and Mollie. As a user you do not have to install an application on your own computer or other device, because that is directly regulated by the SaaS provider. These providers often use a data center on their site to manage the IT infrastructure and the platform on which the application runs.

Direct customers

The direct customers of colocation data centers are companies, governments and non-profit organizations that migrate their IT equipment to a professional data center. This includes computers, storage, security and network equipment. By outsourcing IT, they save on IT costs, increase continuity and guarantee the physical safety of the equipment. Moreover, there are more possibilities in terms of scalability and flexibility.

An increasing amount of companies, governments and organizations choose to migrate their IT-infrastructure to a data center. Below we have listed the most important reason to choose for data center outsourcing.

Reliability

A professional data center has redundant (multiple-implemented) systems that would be too expensive for most companies to purchase and maintain themselves. Redundancy in data infrastructure, cooling and power supply ensure that the customer’s data and services are always accessible even if, for example, the power should fail.

Energy efficiency

Data centers in the Netherlands are quite green: the majority uses green energy and data centers bring enormous efficiency benefits in the field of energy. By bringing IT equipment together in one place and by making use of the most advanced, energy-efficient equipment, huge amounts of energy can be saved compared to on-premise IT. Although some call data centers “energy suckers”, the opposite is true: without the sustainable data centers of the Netherlands we would use more than twice as much power based on our current digital consumption!

Cost saving

A data center is a cheap solution when you consider that it uses high-end and up-to-date equipment and services. If a company would want to achieve the same standards for clean rooms, redundant systems and round-the-clock control within its own walls, a large part of the total budget would have to be reserved to keep all servers operational. Moreover: what are the costs if IT, and therefore all employees of a company, are unable to work because the systems are not available? Continuous availability is guaranteed with a professional data center.

Scalability

Expansion of a company’s IT equipment at its own facility (also known as on-premise or in-house) is often difficult due to literal space limitations. By outsourcing your IT equipment to colocation data centers, it is possible to expand quickly and in a flexible manner whenever the need arises. For example, when a company sees fast growth. An important advantage is that you only pay for the space and energy that is actually used. Therefore, the system of oursourcing is extremely efficient.

Risk Management

Emergencies occur incidentally, but when business-critical equipment runs off-site, it does not necessarily have a negative impact on the company. Colocation is a good strategy to ensure continuity, regardless of whether a data center is used as a primary site for servers or as a mirror site (external copy location) to guarantee constant connectivity during a failure at the primary location. Thanks to data centers, you don’t have to bet on just one horse, so you spread the risk.

Plenty of choice

Every data center is an ecosystem of providers of all kinds of digital services. The amount of network providers, Internet Exchanges, content delivery networks (CDNs), ad exchanges and cloud providers provide a unique platform to make the best choice for a company. New connections can also be made quickly and cheaply. In addition, certainly with the advent of the GDRP privacy legislation in 2018, the choice to store data locally with a national party is often an important consideration.