Lowering the Cost of New Data Centers | Top Considerations

Lowering the Cost of New Data Centers | Part 24 of AFCOM’s Consider This Series

Cloud storage firm Impossible Cloud just opened a data center in Germany. It claims that its design helps it deliver cloud services 75% cheaper than competitors. Let's look at how it achieves this.

Impossible Cloud operates four data centers across North America and Europe. Current locations include facilities in Los Angeles, New York and Frankfurt, Germany

“We are rapidly increasing our global footprint and continually expanding by opening more facilities,” said Daniel Baker, CTO & Co-Founder of Impossible Cloud.

In addition, the company leverages colocation centers that are optimized for increased performance and low latency. The number of servers per data center is 13, and these are spread across multiple racks.

Baker added that the company only works with top-tier data centers with demanding requirements concerning the data centers they are allowed to use. They typically only want to work with facilities that can demonstrate compliance with regulations and international standards such as ISO27001, SOC-2, HIPAA, GDPR, ISO22301, NIST 800-53/FI, PCI DSS and others. In addition, Impossible Cloud centers feature N+1 power and cooling redundancy.

The New German Facility

Its first German data center, located in Frankfurt, is said to be optimized for maximum security, performance and ease-of-use for cloud storage. As well as complying with the various international standards, it includes a proprietary orchestration and security software layer. This introduces features such as triple encryption; multi-factor authentication (MFA); and cross-origin resource sharing (CORS).

“CORS is designed to prevent cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks and other types of malicious activity,” said Baker.

Another feature, one shared between its many data centers, is the avoidance of data concentration in one geography. Impossible Cloud’s decentralized nature means data stored has no single point of failure.

Additionally, the data center is designed to integrate with just about any other technology stack in use by its customers. This can usually be accomplished, according to Baker, by inputting one line of code. To simplify the transfer of large amounts of data, the company provides a migration tool and technical support to streamline a move of existing data sets stored with vendors, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and other providers.

Dealing with Privacy and Data Sovereignty

Data sovereignty has become a hot topic. As well as the European General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR), there are similar laws in other geographies around the world.

“Cloud storage may impact data sovereignty regulations for which a corporation is legally responsible,” said Rich Gadomski, Tape Evangelist at Fujifilm Recording Media USA.

When the cloud is involved, it is common for data to be shunted anywhere for the sake of convenience. But violations are no laughing matter if you are caught engaging in the illegal movement of data out of the region. GDPR fines, for example, now exceed 4 billion Euros. Most of that is recent, indicating that regulators have stepped up detection and prosecution efforts. Meta/Facebook got hit, for example, with more than 2 billion Euros in fines in 2023 alone so far.

Due to its European origins and customer base, Impossible Cloud puts a lot of emphasis on systems to ensure compliance with the GDPR. For clients who require it, the company implements geo-fencing to ensure their data is stored within the EU (or, if required even only within Germany).

“This is our way of guaranteeing cloud autonomy in accordance with the European Data Alliance’s goals,” said Baker.

Storage Infrastructure

The company offers enterprise-grade, native cloud storage that is said to deliver the capabilities of traditional cloud storage. This Kubernetes-friendly, AWS S3-compatible object storage is available throughout Europe and in other regions, with more than 8 petabytes of initial raw storage capacity, access to further enterprise data centers, and durability beyond 11 nines.

Further features include versioning, object lock, immutability for retention of all stored files in their original version, as well as programmatic identity access management (IAM) which allows for the creation of multiple users, access keys, sub-users and groups via API/CLI.

Baker believes object storage is better than block or file storage for large volumes of data in the cloud.

“Object storage offers nearly infinite scaling at higher performance as well as the ability for clients to adjust their storage capacity based on actual need along with the benefits of decentralized web3 technology,” he said.

In addition, Impossible Cloud can help companies switch from web2 to web3 via a single line of code. Baker added that web3 is about flexibility, efficiency and greater control. This is enabled via a decentralized infrastructure, where the location and ownership of data are dispersed among many, rather than a few.

“With hardware/infrastructure owned and maintained by many, a decentralized web3 solution enables us to reduce our capital expenditures, translating to lowered costs for end users, sometimes up to 75% in savings,” said Baker.

The company offers enterprise-grade, native cloud storage that is said to deliver the capabilities of traditional cloud storage This Kubernetes-friendly, AWS S3-compatible object storage is available throughout Europe and in other regions, with more than 8 petabytes of initial raw storage capacity, access to further enterprise data centers, and durability beyond 11 nines.

Further features include versioning, object lock, immutability for retention of all stored files in their original version, as well as programmatic identity access management (IAM) which allows for the creation of multiple users, access keys, sub-users and groups via API/CLI.

Baker believes object storage is better than block or file storage for large volumes of data in the cloud.

“Object storage offers nearly infinite scaling at higher performance as well as the ability for clients to adjust their storage capacity based on actual need along with the benefits of decentralized web3 technology,” he said.

In addition, Impossible Cloud can help companies switch from web2 to web3 via a single line of code. Baker added that web3 is about flexibility, efficiency and greater control. This is enabled via a decentralized infrastructure, where the location and ownership of data are dispersed among many, rather than a few.

“With hardware/infrastructure owned and maintained by many, a decentralized web3 solution enables us to reduce our capital expenditures, translating to lowered costs for end users, sometimes up to 75% in savings,” said Baker.

Please keep an eye out for the next release of “Consider This."