Houston Data Center Services Offers Digital Infrastructure Solutions For Oil and Gas Giants
Houston stands out as the energy capital of the world because it is home to more than 500 oil and gas exploration firms and houses 4,600 energy-related companies. Plus Houston’s 9 refineries produce over 2.3 million barrels of crude oil every day. The Greater Houston Partnership makes the city’s dominance known by emphasizing the area’s 1,100 oilfield service companies, 600 exploration and production firms, and 180 pipeline transportation establishments. The I-10 Corridor manages to house 44 out of 128 publicly traded oil and gas firms. Only three cities in the world have more engineers than Houston.
Impressed yet? The numbers make Houston’s dominance obvious. Dominance, however, does not mean that an industry can get comfortable with its current processes. After all, oil and gas companies in Houston compete with more than 100 solar-related companies and more than 30 wind-related companies. This anchor industry delivers unequaled strength to Houston businesses, however, the oil and gas industry is also known for being averse to change more than any other global industry. The pitfalls and challenges of COVID-19 only hastened innovation and technology adoption, shining a light on the need for greater digital transformation in the emerging tech Hub emerging out of Houston.
Houston’s oil and gas companies need to think ahead about how they will remain competitive against locations around the planet. The coming wave of technology places data analytics, cybersecurity, data sciences, and artificial intelligence as imperative technologies for driving business production efficiencies in the digital age. The success of the energy giants like Phillips66, Halliburton, Conoco Phillips, alongside startups like Tachys, M1neral, and Voyager will finally have a race at one another as competition is defined by the speed to embrace and leverage technology solutions that drive an innovation mindset.
One of the leading ways for companies to become more competitive might surprise you: Houston data center services offer foundational digital infrastructure solutions, enhanced network connectivity, and redundancy to accelerate your business’s digital transformation success.
What Are Colocation Data Centers?
While a data center is any space that houses data servers and other computer equipment to store and transact data, colocation data centers usually involve storing servers from numerous companies in the same warehouse. For example, an oil company might decide that it doesn’t want to keep its data servers on-premises anymore, so the company moves them to a colocation data center, where a dozen – or maybe 100 – other companies keep their data servers. Colocation data centers offer private suites and dedicated data halls that can be customized for single-tenant access with personalized security additions, while at the same time using the shared tenancy structure to leverage significant cost savings when compared to building or maintaining a data center at the company headquarters.
When companies share buildings and data infrastructures, they also save money by sharing costs. Businesses are exposed to far more options for connectivity partners, and safely rest their mission-critical infrastructure in a building that is purpose-built for security and redundancy. The resilience of a purpose-built colocation data center allows the business to focus on their core competencies with the assurance that its mission-critical data is secure and fully connected.
Our Houston colocation data center also has some unique benefits. The building houses four separate data halls. Three of the 10,000 square foot data halls are dedicated wholesale data halls for a single Houston business customer. The last data hall is a shared tenancy hall for customers will small to midsize deployments. Two new data halls are being built with completion slated for the end of Q1 2022.
Benefits of Houston Colocation Data Center Services
Large energy companies already have data servers where they can store massive amounts of information. Many of those companies keep their servers in a building owned by the corporation. Perhaps they manage a server farm in the headquarters’ subfloors. Maybe they have a warehouse outside of the city that houses hundreds or thousands of machines.
Yet, on-prem data centers require extensive budgets for management and maintenance that can be outsourced to a premier data center provider. Houston oil and gas companies stand to realize extensive benefits from leveraging colocation data center space close and accessible to their businesses.
Colocation Data Centers Offer Excellent Physical Security
IT leaders need to pay attention to the physical security of their networks and data servers. One distracted guard is all it takes for someone to enter a typical data warehouse and start acquiring information.
Our Houston facility employs 8-layers of security for not only higher levels of physical security but extensive protection that includes military-grade anti-crash fencing, exterior and interior cameras monitoring the entire facility, multiple man-traps, dual authentication biometric identification, and SOC operations running 24x7x365.
Additionally, our Houston colocation data center offers excellent safety from disasters such as floods and storms, protecting vital equipment from damage.
Variety of Deployment Customization
The Houston colocation data center can house various different deployment types, from secure cages, locked cabinets, private suites to dedicated data halls. The additional space allows businesses to flex for scalability and services that are the right fit for where your business is currently at.
Colocation data centers typically have high-density solutions that on-premises data storage lacks. Thanks to high-density data technology, companies can scale up or down quickly. For example, an oil company that needs to process twice as much information as usual, can rely on the colocation data center’s equipment to adjust to the increased workload. Our data center hosts one of the highest density supercomputers in the nation, using liquid immersion cooling, so high-density options are certainly available for any compute load.
Never Lose Access to Your Company’s Data
Only the largest oil and gas corporations can afford to have their IT teams working 24 hours a day. Realistically, it doesn’t make sense for a business to spend money on data engineers working during the third shift. More often than not, it’s a waste of money.
With colocation Houston data center services, though, companies can get the 24/7 IT assistance they want without spending more money than necessary. Houston data center services can include 24-hour uptime. If something prevents companies from accessing their data, the on-site IT team can identify and solve the issue quickly. Since the same group of IT specialists serve the data availability of so many corporations, individual companies pay a negligible cost to maintain constant access to their information.
Colocation Data Center Services Lower Overhead Costs
Corporations pay extravagant costs to house and operate their on-premises data servers. Rental costs dipped somewhat during 2020, but they will likely recover over the next few years. Even after the minor slip, companies could expect to spend about $28.314 per square foot for office space. Industrial space, which could potentially meet the needs of a server farm, costs significantly less. Renters can expect to spend about $7.32 per square foot.
The more data an oil and gas company collects, the more space it needs to house its servers. Regardless of small changes in the commercial and industrial real estate market, businesses will always end up spending more money as they collect the data needed to make informed decisions that lead to success.
The cost of housing a server farm becomes even more stupefying when executives learn how much electricity the machines and requisite cooling systems need to operate. Ideally, a server room needs to stay between 50 and 82 degrees F. The space also needs to maintain a constant temperature so machines can run smoothly. When hundreds of servers work at full capacity, even industrial cooling systems must fight to keep the environment cool. If the servers overheat, though, precious data could disappear.
Colocation helps mitigate the expense of maintaining data servers by dividing the cost among everyone using the Houston data center services. Companies already need to cool their data warehouses, so they might as well split the cost of utilities
Contact Element Critical for a Personalized Plan
Colocation can certainly be a significant part of your hybrid data center strategies, helping oil and gas companies lower their expenses, improve access to information, and become more competitive.
Contact Element Critical to learn more about the pros and cons of colocation. Our experts can help you decide whether our Houston data center services match your needs. If you decide to try colocation, they can also help you select an option that works best for your unique needs including locked cabinets, secure cages, private suites, and dedicated data halls.
