Colocation Versus Building An Onsite Server Room
Are you trying to decide between an onsite server room and renting space from a colocation facility?
When the web was still in its infancy most corporate data servers were located on-premise. Many business owners were forced to spend a large sum of money to invest and maintain an onsite infrastructure. With the explosive growth of the Internet in recent years more people are relying on data storage. The datacenter has assumed a more prominent role in the security and management of servers, making colocation a serious consideration for business owners. Take a moment to read the benefits of outsourcing your in-house server room into a datacenter.
Reasons to consider colocation:
- Colocation offers a significant amount of savings. Placing the responsibility of power, cooling, connectivity and security into a colocation provider you are saving money on energy, bandwidth, and maintenance costs.
- You can leverage a colocation provider’s expertise and 24/7 support. Staffing for after hours or holidays can really add up with over-time. Colocation removes the hassle of specialized staffing and helps you reduce the cost of labor. Any required after hour infrastructure maintenance is off-loaded to the trained datacenter technicians without any extra cost to you.
- To establish an onsite server room comparable to that of a datacenter would require a significant investment. The capital expense needed for high-level security, fire suppression, cooling and power technology can be beyond budget. By moving your infrastructure needs to a colocation provider you can remove the concerns of the capital expense needed to build an onsite server room.
- Instead of budgeting for yearly infrastructure maintenance and upgrades you can use that money towards revenue producing initiatives. Colocation offers a predictable monthly price, leaving it easy to budget and regulate your IT cost for the year.
- Many business owners fear the loss of control over their company servers if they are not located on-premise to see and touch. However, with full ownership of your equipment, you remain in control over your server’s hardware and software. If you select a colocation provider that is in traveling distance you can physically alter and access your server at any time; night or day.
- Colocation enables you to increase or decrease space as needed. Simply add additional racks to accommodate business growth. Or remove racks as your business demands, without worrying about build-outs or unused space.
- Outages can have a crippling effect on your business. Paralyzing your productivity and leading to revenue lost. Colocation facilities ensure an uninterruptible power supply system is in place. This allows your server remains available and running at optimal performance.
Example:
If a power outage were to occur, UPS (uninterruptible power supplies) and backup diesel generators would kick in to keep the colocation providers facility up and running continuously during the local outage.
- Datacenters focus on data storage, management, and security, which is their number one job. This means they have the physical protections in place including alarm systems and video monitoring. Datacenters also have the controls needed to protect against threats to your sensitive data being processed and stored. There are firewalls and analysis detection that identify deviations and signs of compromise early on to quickly trace and null malicious attacks to the network.
- Most businesses receive mediocre network coverage at best. It can be costly and difficult for a business to obtain the required bandwidth for network connectivity. Data centers already have access to large multi-gigabit and higher connections from many providers.
If you are facing the decision to create, move, expand, or consolidate your data center, colocation should be a number one consideration as it provides many benefits for your company.
