UNCOVERING THE LAYERS
infrastructure in the United States , Canada and Australia . These instances are located in two or more separate Availability Zones within each respective country .”
So , the model is clear – SaaS provision operates on redundancy from paired data centres . This is true for every enterprise SaaS player .
Why power costs matter
Price per transaction is a priority for SaaS companies . The SaaS business model demands providers look to drive out costs and get the greatest ROI from their assets wherever and however possible .
But those SaaS companies that rely upon colocation data centres don ’ t have control over the power element of their cost base , because the way data centre power topologies have been designed dictates how power is provisioned . They are fixed and wasteful . As SaaS continues to scale , power costs as a percentage of cost of goods can only rise . If SaaS providers are paying too much for power or having to pay for power they don ’ t use then that becomes an additional cost to be passed on to the end-user .
The answer lies in ‘ Power-as-a-Service ’. Here are some questions to consider :
1 . Will enterprise customers be forced by regulators to account for the energy and carbon cost of their SaaS applications ?
2 . As customers of commercial data centre operators , will SaaS providers demand access to flexible and adaptable power ? 3 . How can data centre operators respond ?
4 . Can inflexible power provision in data centres be addressed without ripping and replacing the existing infrastructure ?
To address the above and answer many other questions which are starting to surface about cloud provision of all kinds , ‘ Power-as-a-Service ’ ( PaaS ) needs to become an available offering from service providers . Fortunately , technology already exists which can enable the sorts of fixed data centre
WITH A CAGR OF 11.7 % IN THE NEXT FOUR- YEAR PERIOD , THE PROJECTED SAAS MARKET SIZE WILL BE ABOUT US $ 307.3 BILLION BY THE END OF 2026 .
power systems that are ubiquitous to fulfil the adaptable and redundant power requirements of SaaS applications .
Adaptable Redundant Power ( ARP ) from i3 Solutions Group is one such solution designed to address many of the
flexibility requirements to make PaaS a reality for SaaS environments . By making energy use more economical and flexible , ARP technology brings agility to data centres by accessing trapped power and reconfiguring the power system topology to provide granularity to match SaaS service levels . The obvious benefits are power resilience better aligned with SLAs , more efficient utilisation and the reduction of needless emissions .
In the end , all costs of production and delivery are ultimately charges the customer must bear . Unlike consumers , enterprises cannot ignore the cost of electricity that powers their applications . At the same time , SaaS market players will likely face more regulatory and investor scrutiny of their power use and carbon footprint . Neither they , nor their data centre partners , can afford to risk letting the cost of power spin out of control . Smart commercial data centre operators who are hosting , or wish to host , large SaaS customers can add value to their offering by providing PaaS based on technologies such as ARP . ◊
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