How colocation helps you drive the costs out of your application delivery model

We’re hearing more stories and seeing more companies move their infrastructure out of a virtual environment and back into a physical environment using high-reliability outsourced data centers.

Why are these companies making the switch? Long-term costs. Virtual environments often charge by the resource, i.e. disk, processors, number of servers, and SAN throughput. Companies using virtual infrastructure are finding that the cost of these resources over time becomes too high. If the company is a SaaS provider, the costs eat into profits. Companies using virtual infrastructure for internal IT see an ever-escalating monthly operating expense.

So these companies spend some time evaluating their infrastructure and come up with a suitable hardware/software architecture. It’s much easier these days to build in reliability and redundancy. The companies are using hypervisor software like VMware, multiple physical servers, redundant SANs, dual switches and dual firewalls. They end up with an architecture that can survive multiple failures with no interruptions in service. And often times the hardware/software architecture pays for itself in one year when compared to their virtual environment. Long-term costs go down, and the company ends up having more control over their infrastructure.

The new equipment needs a home. Companies are using affordable colocation rather than expensive IT managed services providers. What are they looking for?

• 99.995% uptime – 27 minutes of downtime per year or less, equal to that of an Uptime Institute certified Rated-4 data center
• Fair pricing – a simple, easy-to-understand data center pricing model helps with forecasting and incremental growth
• Hardened data center facilities – buildings that are F5 tornado resistant
• Carrier neutral data centers – many choices on telecommunications providers for bandwidth and transport
• No cross connect fees – no monthly add-on fees for connections directly to the carriers
• Data center certifications and compliance – SAS 70 Type II data centers, TIA 942 compliant data centers

What are the savings? Do the math. You may find out that you’re spending too much on your cloud computing data center’s virtual environment.

Do you need to drive the costs out of your application delivery model? Call Lifeline Data Centers at 317.423.2591.

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.