Affordable colocation, data center compliance and 99.995% uptime are not mutually exclusive

Affordable colocation, data center compliance and 99.995% uptime are not mutually exclusive.

Many organizations will need to make significant changes to their enterprise data center in the next few years. These changes are driven by a number of factors:

• Limits on data center power, data center cooling, and floor space at the in-house data center
• Government regulations, more data center certification and data center compliance requirements
• Higher data center uptime requirements: expectations of your systems uptime is higher than ever
• Server and storage virtualization: the purchase of new power-hungry servers and storage area networks
• Business continuity and disaster recovery projects that include additional data center space off-site
• The availability of cheaper bandwidth and transport and the potential for significant cost savings

These ongoing changes to the data center and your client expectations are driving more businesses to consider wholesale colocation, a specific type of outsource data center facility. Companies are using wholesale data centers in three broad ways:

• As a primary data center environment where the most critical applications reside
• As a disaster recovery center or secondary site for SAN, data replication, and other business continuity applications
• As the center of a wide area network. Note, this is beneficial only if provider is a carrier neutral data center with plenty of telecom providers and no cross-connect fees.

IT organizations that “do the math” often discover that renting space in a wholesale data center can result in significant costs savings and an improvement in data center uptime. It’s because “building your own” can be cost-prohibitive when you consider the data center capital costs of dual power feeds, dual generators, dual power conditioning systems, and redundant data center cooling systems.

But in order to achieve the highest reliability and the most cost savings, you must be selective with your wholesale data center provider. Here’s a list of questions to ask:

• Are your facilities hardened data centers, or in the Midwest, F5 tornado resistant data centers?
• Do you offer rack space or private cages?
• Is your data center pricing model easy to understand?
• How do you bill for power: do I pay based on usage or based on circuit size?
• How do you bill for rack space usage: do I pay as I grow?
• Are you SAS 70 Type II certified?
• How do you handle data center compliance and audits?
• Do you have multiple locations?
• Are you a carrier neutral data center?
• How many telecom providers are available?
• Do you charge monthly cross-connect fees for the privilege of staying connected to the carriers?
• What IT services are available, and how are they billed?
• Are you publicly or privately held?
• Are the owners involved in day-to-day operations?
• Are you growing?
• What are you doing to keep power costs down?
• Do you have staging and office space?
• Who are your other clients?

The good news is: affordable colocation, data center compliance, and 99.995% uptime (which is the expectation for a Rated-4 data center) are NOT mutually exclusive. Lifeline Data Center provides wholesale colocation in a carrier neutral data center with no cross connect fees. For more information, call me at Lifeline, 317.423.2591 or fill out the form below.

Alex Carroll

Managing Member at Lifeline Data Centers

Alex, co-owner, is responsible for all real estate, construction and mission critical facilities: hardened buildings, power systems, cooling systems, fire suppression, and environmentals. Alex also manages relationships with the telecommunications providers and has an extensive background in IT infrastructure support, database administration and software design and development. Alex architected Lifeline’s proprietary GRCA system and is hands-on every day in the data center.