Distributed data centers lower costs

Due to their proximity to customers, geographically dispersed data centers have much lower latency per application and per service than centralized data centers. This is important for highly interactive applications such as virtual desktops, online gaming and video conferencing, or those using Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. These applications are all affected by latency. And they typically consume more network bandwidth as the number of users increases.

While a distributed data center architecture is not right for every service provider, Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs modeling results confirm it is cost effective. In one scenario, Bell Labs examined the relationship between bandwidth consumed per-subscriber for a data center-hosted application and the cost to deliver it. The model shows that the cost of bandwidth per subscriber eventually exceeds the cost of operating the distributed data center.

As illustrated in the upper chart in Figure 1, the cost per application increases linearly for services hosted in a centralized data center. It remains relatively stable for applications hosted in a distributed data center.