Is your in-house data center nickel and diming you to death?

Is your in-house data center nickel and diming you to death?

Is your internal data center expensive to operate? Forget what’s in the racks. I’m not talking about servers, networking equipment and storage. I’m talking about facilities: your raised floor, your security, your power, your cooling, your telecommunications infrastructure and your fire suppression. How expensive is it to maintain?

Operating a data center in-house is expensive. Real estate floor space costs, raised flooring, reliable air conditioning systems, specialized security and fire protection all drive up the data center capital costs. Small data centers can easily exceed $1 million in capital up front.

Data center power and cooling redundancy is expensive. Multiple UPS systems are fairly common. Dual generators are rare. Rarer still are in-house data centers have two utility feeds. Data center capital costs are high, but the costs of maintaining and operating generators and UPS systems are high as well. N+N data center redundancy (two of everything) is prohibitively expensive for many organizations. You can’t deliver high uptime without power and cooling redundancy, yet uptime requirements continue to rise.

Staffing is expensive. Do you dedicate half an FTE or more to the maintenance of the data center?

Data center compliance and certifications are expensive. SAS70 (Now SSAE 16) data center certification audits start at about $20,000. Other certifications like the Uptime Institute’s Rated-4 data center certification can cost more.

Not only are the data center capital and operating costs high, they’re also unpredictable.

How do you control costs?

Wholesale colocation offers an interesting solution. Wholesale data center providers build and operate high-tech real estate. Here are a few of the reasons that organizations choose to outsource the data center facilities.

You can rent the space you need in these giant data centers.

You can still have full control of your IT equipment and telecom infrastructure.

You can benefit from N+N data center redundancy in power, cooling, and telecom to improve uptime.

In a select few outsourced hardened data centers, you can protect your mission critical systems from F5 tornadoes and other regional risks.

Some Midwest colocation providers offer you access to multiple telecommunications providers with no cross connect fees. You can build telecom hubs to better manage the money spent on telecommunications.

You can trade capital costs for operating costs.

You can build a highly predictable cost model that allows for growth and change.

Sick of getting nickel and dimed to death? Call the outsourced data center experts.

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.