This interview was first published in the Dutch opinion magazine Elsevier.
Where should you look for when choosing a data center?
“Basically, a data center sells security. The infrastructure must be completely reliable. Power and cooling systems must be designed so that that customers are always being ‘’served’’. The technical level of redundancy, coupled with professional operational management, determines the availability of the data center and the herein housed systems and applications. A reliable data center should be able to provide an uptime percentage around one hundred percent. To continue to offer security, it’s important that a data center can grow alongside customer needs, both in physical space as well as in power and network capacity. Support is also important. A good data center provides 24/7 on-site technical support. ”
Connectivity is also getting more and more important. Why is connectivity so important?
“The customer should have a free choice of provider and hoster. This enables entrepreneurs to get good SLA’s, realize purchasing benefits from a location, to quickly scale capacity and open new markets. Our data center offers access to more than fifty networks and in addition connection to AMS-IX, NL-ix and LINX NoVa. Moreover, entrepreneurs can benefit from several private clouds and access to public clouds such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft Azure Clouds. ”
Do data centers offer hybrid cloud solutions themselves?
“That is in my opinion a basic requirement. For example, we have developed EvoSwitch Open Cloud. In cooperation with AMS-IX, customers from our data center can be provided worldwide access to the large public clouds. This increases the applications of carrier-neutral data centers and provides an increased growth of enterprise and government customers. ”
And what about security?
“Both the data center and offices are protected against all risks such as fires, floods and burglary. This involves a complete system consisting of procedures, prevention and control. Leading organizations such as Wikipedia cannot afford to be offline for only a brief moment. ”
How important is it to also pay attention to sustainability?
“Sustainability is not only good for the environment. A company with low power consumption allows lower costs and can therefore offer more competitive prices. EvoSwitch is a leader from the start in 2007 when it comes to energy efficiency and at the forefront when it comes to data center technologies. Partly thanks to a self-developed free cooling concept, we can reduce energy consumption by about eighty percent, and we are even completely CO2-neutral. “