Digital Realty Trust : Defying Data Gravity in Dallas

They say "everything's bigger in Texas" - including the opportunities. With miles of affordable space for unfettered expansion, a cost of living that's 98.9% of the national average, and no state income tax, the Dallas-Ft. Worth Metroplex (DFW) area is experiencing something of a renaissance.

What used to be just another oil and gas hotspot in the country's oil hotbed is now one of the hottest markets around for attracting leading businesses from a multitude of industries and sectors, as well as a new wave of well-educated, highly skilled workers to fill nearly 200 jobs added each day-approximately 23% of the state's total output.

DFW is home to 18 Fortune 500 companies and 38 Fortune 1000 companies that include household names like AT&T, Texas Instruments, Kubota Tractor, and Toyota. The enterprise community has evolved and spans industries ranging from transportation and healthcare to banking and retail, alongside the legacy oil and gas presence.

The region has also become a destination for large hyperscalers and internet providers servicing the south-central US, owing to its high-density connectivity and affordable power options that make the area an attractive disaster recovery location for businesses with a low tolerance for downtime and data latency.

The Dallas Digital Ecosystem

The Dallas/Fort Worth region is one of the busiest and most competitive data center markets in the U.S., according to the Data Center Frontier Dallas Market Report and saw the third highest data center leasing activity in North America in 2020 after Toronto and Northern Virginia. The growth in demand during 2020 was fueled by cloud service providers and large tech companies. Dallas-Fort Worth had 33.7 megawatts (MW) of net absorption This is a key metric tied to power usage at data centers, and represents an increase of over 30 percent. Also, the data center vacancy rate dropped to 18 percent despite 39.5 MW of additional inventory. Expectations are that the continued migration of business from other parts of the country to the Dallas area will further accelerate data center market growth.

The Challenge of Data Gravity

There is ample evidence that explosive growth in the volume of data being created and processed is a worldwide trend:

• IDG has revealed that data volumes are growing at an average of 63% per month
• The World Economic Forum estimates that over 463 exabytes of data will be created every day by 2025
• According to IDC, by 2025, 80% of data worldwide will reside in enterprises
• More than 200 network, IT, financial, cloud and content partners and providers, and enterprise customers
• Multi cloud access via Service Exchange
  
• Internet connectivity, including internet exchange access via DRIX, DE-CIX and GCIIX

For businesses in the Dallas Metro area and elsewhere, this explosion in data growth has serious implications. This is because as more and more data is created and processed across organizational locations, it becomes increasingly difficult for the enterprise to manage.

The term Data Gravity has been applied to this phenomenon-which is present in almost every major metro worldwide. Effectively, Data Gravity describes the process whereby the accumulation of data results in the parallel accumulation of applications, systems and services required to store and process that data. When data volumes grow exponentially, traditional data architectures simply cannot keep up with the proliferation. With the data mass too unwieldy to be moved between data centers, cloud services and networks, data architectures need to evolve and become data-centric, bringing users, applications and networks to the data instead.

To learn more about Data Gravity, watch the video

Digital Reality developed the Data Gravity Index™ to measure the intensity of Data Gravity across more than 50 metros globally, providing business leaders with detailed insights about the impact of data growth on their organizations and a roadmap for future-proofing their digital transformation roadmap.

The measure is based on estimates of data creation, aggregation, and exchange segmented by industry. The index pegs an overall compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 164% through 2024 for the Dallas Metro area. The region also appears in Digital Reality's Data Gravity Index Report as one of 53 metros which will require an increase of over 40% in compute processing to accommodate the increased new digital workflows, indicating a significant opportunity for organizations across industries to establish infrastructure there to support local end user data demands .

Data-Centric Architecture Based on PlatformDIGITAL®

Data Gravity inhibits enterprise workflow performance, raises security concerns, and increases costs.

A data-centric architecture addresses these concerns by creating robust, interconnected data communities in which enterprises are linked with connectivity, cloud and content providers at centers of data exchange so that data can be shared between users across channels and geographic locations.

This is what Digital Reality's clients get with PlatformDIGITAL®, a Pervasive Data Center Architecture (PDx™) that operates within multi-tenant data centers.

Accessing a Data-Centric Architecture in Dallas

Within the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area, Digital Realty operates a PlatformDIGITAL ecosystem of 13 data centers spread over a 69 mile radius which includes the high technology corridor in Richardson. This connected campus offers enterprise clients from the Dallas metro secure and reliable colocation, network, compliance, security, disaster recovery, and cloud services for complete hybrid IT support.

With dedicated connectivity from their private architecture, clients have access to:

• More than 200 network, IT, financial, cloud and content partners and providers, and enterprise customers
• Multi cloud access via Service Exchange
  
• Internet connectivity, including internet exchange access via DRIX, DE-CIX and GCIIX

For more information, explore the Dallas Digital campus or download a copy of Digital Reality's Dallas Metro Brief. Alternatively, Contact us to schedule a tour.