Data centres of the future and Asia Pacific interconnectivity demands

Data centres and carrier neutral colocation facilities in the Asia Pacific region need to utilize a minimum of four undersea cables on each global route to offer the needed reliability and availability to client organizations, states an industry study. In a few cases, even four undersea cables may be insufficient to deliver the desired 99.999% availability.

’Five Nines’ have become more than a target as organizations expect this degree of availability as well as reliable and fast access to crucial business data and applications. Multinational enterprises and cloud services want the interconnectivity between carrier neutral colocation and data centres to be as readily available and resilient as the centres themselves.

A study by Digital Realty assessed multiple databases with details on the undersea cable routes which link global data centres. It provides vital statistics on the availability percentage and number of outages and repairs in a year for each important global cable route in the Asia Pacific.

Resiliency Results

The assessment reveals some crucial traits of network resiliency features in the Asia Pacific. To start, the region’s systems are somewhat similar to those in Africa and South America as wet systems are widely utilized to offer links to each nation. This is drastically different from the North American practice of exclusively using dry terrestrial fibre to link leading centres.

The study discovered that most routes in the Asia Pacific can provide higher than 90% availability. This is a good result and its shows the need to utilize multiple cables on every major route. This method is critical to maximizing data centre infrastructure’s resiliency as undersea cable outages are almost inevitable.

The evaluation utilized two methods to assess the cable routes to offer robust findings. It indicates that a minimum of four cables are needed on most Asia Pacific routes to get availability of Five Nines. But this number also depends on the route’s reliability. For instance, routes that have less than 90% availability results require six or more multiple cables to deliver this standard. Routes like Indonesia-Hong Kong, China-Singapore, and Taiwan-Singapore will not be able to provide Five Nines availability, states the study.

On other routes, availability of Five Nines can be exceeded. For instance, it can be achieved on the Japan-Australia route with just three cables, because of its high availability score of 99.189%. In contrast, the score on a Hong Kong-Singapore route was less than 90% and six cables will be needed to deliver Five Nines.

Submarine Cables Face Plenty of Risks

Cable outages can last from fewer than three days a year to over 45 days. This is because submarine cables face a lot of risks such as natural disasters, bad weather, dredging, ship anchors, and fishing gear which can create damage.

The travel distance and availability of ships nearby dictate the time required to repair submarine cables. Some repairs are more complex and also it may take time to obtain permits from the concerned authorities. For example, damage caused by the 2011 Japan tsunami took a long period to repair.

Additionally, on many routes, cables are in shallow waters and thus face greater risks compared to deep-sea cables. For instance, cables in the China, Japan, and Yellow seas get damaged frequently by fishing, earthquakes, and other causes.

Developing a Resilient Data Centre Network

The above elements make it crucial for enterprises to make sure that their data centre infrastructure has the needed resilience to deliver the reliability expected by their customers. The study offers a starting point to those building or running hyperscale carrier neutral locations and data centres in the Asia Pacific. But as Five Nines requires different diversity levels, a single-vendor or single-source method will not suffice. Rather, an ecosystem is the need of the hour.

To clarify, we suggest that the best way to get Five Nines deployment is by using a data centre firm that leverages a strong ecosystem of choices. Such an operator will be able utilize sufficient transport systems to design a resilient model that is distributed across a collection of partner vendors. Therefore, we advise that organisations utilize colocation services providers like STT GDC India that can use the maximum number of multiple routes in their digital networks.