The US hyperscale cloud sector has a problem. Demand for cloud services is unprecedented, and will continue to grow as the decade continues. But the industry’s attempts to meet this demand are experiencing some frustrating headwinds.

The multi-megawatt campus-style projects that have defined the last decade of cloud construction in places like Ashburn, Virginia, and the Nevada desert, are being buffeted by strong supply chain headwinds, increasingly strict regulation, and the ever-present demands from private equity to maximize quarterly revenue.

Tier I markets like Northern Virginia are no longer the welcoming havens of cheap land, readily available power, and wide-armed local governments they were in the 2010s. Therefore, more hyperscalers are moving their capacity into Tier II and Tier III markets — places like the Midwest, where the conditions are right for their power-hungry megastructures to flourish.

Building new large-scale campuses in states where they’ve never existed before, however, is obviously even more time and resource intensive than doing so in markets where these hyperscalers have operated for years.

As a result, US hyperscalers are starting to switch their attention back to the colocation market, which offers a welcome source of readily available capacity — especially in Tier II and Tier III markets. 

The Switch to Colocation
This shift in the way hyperscalers look to scale their platforms has become a huge opportunity for colocation data center operators in emerging markets. However, for companies that have focused solely on offering enterprise and retail colocation, fitting up a hyperscale cloud-ready white space environment to the standards and timeline expected by a hyperscale customer can pose a daunting challenge.

Hyperscalers rely on high levels of standardization existing across the entirety of their (often global) footprints, so they can replicate their environments and capitalize on efficiencies of scale. Their white space environments are built to exacting, often complex standards from a playbook replicated anywhere at any size, especially regarding containment, connectivity, and power.

Not only is the process of outfitting colocation white space for hyperscale cloud complex, but it’s needed fast. Colocation providers who can’t keep up face the prospect of being left behind by those who can.

The Prism Process — Breaking Apart the Pain Points
One solution to these hyperscale pain points is a process that allows for the simplification of highly complex projects, and greater visibility, speed, and predictability thanks to a form of analysis based on tens of thousands of data points and decades of experience.

Just as a glass prism splits white light into clearly defined colors, Instor’s Prism Process takes white space complexity and creates clarity by dividing it into six manageable steps.

The Prism Process:

1. Breaks down data center design and installation criteria into smaller component tasks and sub-tasks, so complex systems can be observed more easily. 

2. Identifies all the variables with the potential to affect each component sub-task, to further simplify the process of observing, understanding, and solving complications. 

3. Using Instor’s 30-plus years of experiential data, it is then possible to apply weighted probabilities to each variable, generating an aggregate score for each sub-task using a multivariate analysis theorem. 

4. Each individual task’s result is then combined to produce a total project score. 

5. These holistic, yet granular insights are used to inform a plan which utilizes Instor’s wide-ranging expertise and skillsets to deliver white space projects – which are scalable, efficient, reliable, and secure – both on-time and on-budget.

6. Upon completion, the positive and negative outcomes of each project are then fed back into the Prism Process, to ensure continuous learning and improvement.

The Prism Process makes the individual, subjective expertise of a small number of elite professionals replicable at scale, and draws upon tens of thousands of data points to meld that individual experience with vast amounts of objective information.

The result is that the process maximizes the impact of Instor’s combined 300+ years of individual installation experience, thousands of successfully completed migrations, hundreds of megawatts deployed across five continents, 36,000 miles of network circuitry installed annually, and zero damage claims filed during the past decade.

Seizing the Colocation Opportunity
The hyperscale demand shift into the colocation sector represents a golden opportunity for data center operators in Tier II and Tier III markets. 

Securing that demand through the tender process represents a big challenge in a section of the market populated by evenly matched operators, few of whom have the necessary experience working alongside hyperscale clients. 

This is where a partner like Instor can prove instrumental in creating the necessary roadmap to secure orders from hyperscalers, marry their exacting standards with existing physical white space assets, and ensure the excellence of the final product.