The majority of organizations that operate globally have too many data centers in too many countries, says market research company Gartner. Companies could save a lot of money and deliver services better had they only had two data centers per continent where they do business.

Rakesh Kumar, research VP at Gartner, said the reason companies had too many data centers was usually expansion, either organically or through acquisition, over time. “While the logic of business growth makes sense, having too many data centers results in excessive capital and operational costs, an overly complex architecture and, in many cases, a lack of business-IT agility,” he said.

Data centers inhibit many companies' ability to respond quickly to business changes because of too many organizational layers signing off on decisions, and because solutions designed for one data center may have to be completely redesigned for another site. A dual data center topology can also save companies like this a lot of operational expenses.

For most organizations, it will mean two sites each for North America, South America, Europe, Africa and the Asia-Pacific region.

Although many global organizations will typically own all of the sites, in some cases it makes sense to use a hosted site that provides the physical building, power and cooling, while the global organization owns the IT assets, Gartner recommended.

“The twin data center topology provides many benefits, such as allowing for an adequate level of disaster recovery,” Kumar said. “This can be through an active-active configuration where each data center splits the production and development work and can fail over the load of the other site in the event of a disaster.

“However, this presupposes a synchronous copy of data and, so, a physical separation of about 60 to 100 miles. This may be too risky for certain industries, such as banking and government security, and so a third site may be required.”

The twin-site approach also allows the central IT organization to better manage data center operations because the number of sites is limited and each is of a significant size and so will be able to negotiate well with suppliers and attract good skills.