What are Hyperscalers?

There is jargon in every industry, and IT is no different from any other. One term being increasingly used is ‘Hyperscaler’; with an international energy price crisis, worldwide chip shortage, and rapidly increasing demand for all things tech, it’s certainly being bandied about more and more. But what does it mean and how is it relevant to Procurri? Let’s look at the basics.

What is a Hyperscaler?

A Hyperscaler is the name used to refer to one of the large companies providing cloud, networking, and internet services at scale through their infrastructure on an IaaS model. There are only a few corporates that can truly be referred to by this term as there’s a limited amount of competition in the space; simply because they are so dominant and so large. Today’s Hyperscalers include Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, and Alibaba.

Basically speaking, every time that a consumer streams a movie, uses AI, backs up photos, or shops online, there’s a good chance that their data is running through infrastructure operated by a hyperscaler.

Generally speaking, most people would know a Hyperscaler by their name alone as they’re likely to be a very well known brand, but other key characteristics include:

• Massive global data center footprint
• Highly automated operations
• Elastic scaling
• Pay-as-you-go pricing
• Standardized infrastructure
• The ability to support millions of users simultaneously.

The word ‘Hyperscaler’ itself is derived from the ‘hyper-scaling’ of the infrastructure; the creation of systems designed to expand efficiently from thousands to millions of servers while maintaining performance and reliability.

What is Hyperscale Computing?

Hyperscale computing is the practice the Hyperscalers use: the ability to scale their architecture promptly and appropriately as increased demand is added to the system. This involves the process of providing and adding compute, memory, networking, and storage resources to a set of nodes at the same time. These nodes make up part of a larger computing, distributed computing, or grid computing environment.

Computing with the rapid ability to scale is necessary to build a robust cloud, big data, distributed storage, and map-reduce functionality and is critical for any large website.

Why does a business need to work with a Hyperscaler?

Large businesses need cloud enablement to offer a great service, and so their data will need to be hosted securely there. When there’s a lot of data to be held, working with a Hyperscaler ensures the capacity required is ready and that performance can be maintained at all times.

Reliability

For businesses to provide a seamless service even when demand fluctuates, working with a Hyperscaler gives the best functionality and performance, relying on their tens of thousands of physical servers and virtual machines for cost-effective, easily accessible, and scalable data center resources. This is simply power that most organizations would be unable to manage for themselves.

Scalability

As per their name, Hyperscalers can reliably deal with fluctuations in demand or resources – offering the ability to expand exponentially in just minutes. This allows for seasonal changes as well as a variation of demand as and when needed.

Cost Efficiency

With no need to purchase and maintain physical hardware, working with a Hyperscaler is an ideal way for SMEs to gain access to unbeatable services without a heavy initial investment.

Future-proofing

As Hyperscalers are amongst some of the world’s largest and most powerful tech companies, working with them also offers a degree of reassurance for future-proofing. As Hyperscalers look to continually develop and improve their business, they invest vast amounts of money in innovating and growing their systems. For example, Microsoft recently invested almost $20bn to improve the infrastructure around its Azure cloud: undoubtedly an amount most other companies would be unable to spend on their own data center provision!

It’s also worth bearing in mind that given their size and sheer power, Hyperscalers are always sure to be at the forefront of innovation in the field they operate within. If a business is hoping to access advanced services such as AI, machine learning, analytics, or serverless computing, working with a Hyperscaler is the easiest (and often cheapest!) way to do so.

The Criticisms faced by Hyperscalers

Of course, household names – particularly in tech – are never far from criticism and challenges. Hyperscalers face several of these, primarily including:

Vendor Lock-In

Moving workloads between cloud providers can be difficult when a client is working with a Hyperscaler, as each tends to want clients ‘locked in’ to their preferred services and suppliers. This can make movement tricky and inflexible.

Cost Management

Cloud spending can grow unexpectedly as demand rises, and with Hyperscalers offering almost unlimited potential for growth and development, budgets can rapidly escalate with little warning. This can make for uncertain spending.

Market Concentration

A few providers control a significant portion of global cloud infrastructure, which makes their operations often criticised. Realistically, unless any large new players come to the forefront of the market, it is unlikely that anyone else will enter this market and so competition remains only between a few companies.

How do Hyperscalers differ from Traditional Data Center Services?

There are vast material differences between Hyperscalers and traditional data center services in their nature. Summed up in basic terms, the following table explains:

How are Hyperscalers relevant to Procurri?

While Procurri isn’t a Hyperscaler itself, we do work with them in several capacities. Our ITAD services have been used in the past to allow for the reuse and recycling of server hardware as it reaches the end of its life in a Hyperscaler’s data center; allowing for the increased sustainability credentials of the site and residual value to be fed back into the business. We have also worked with several companies of this size on our WFH Asset Reclaim Program to avoid unnecessary hardware procurement.

Unsure of if your data center requirement is suited to your own facility or if you need the services of a Hyperscaler? Get in touch and let’s evaluate your equipment and capacity needs.