Moving? Outsource data center facilities may cost less than building your own

Is your company moving?  Leasing or buying new office space impacts the business in several ways.  One of the decisions a company must make is the decision whether to build a new enterprise data center or outsource data center facilities.

The impact of critical computer system downtime to your business is the major factor in your decision to build or outsource.  If the cost of downtime is high, you will need to build a tier III or higher rated data center to avoid downtime.  The capital costs associated with building a hardened data center facility with multiple power feeds, multiple air conditioning units, and SAS 70 data center compliance can easily add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars, even for a small computer room.

Consider how affordable colocation can be as compared to building your own.  Many companies benefit by avoiding the capital expenses of building a data center and instead leasing space as an operating expense.  If the company culture is slanted towards building your own, make it clear to the stakeholders that redundancy is important.  Many companies will buy a single generator, UPS and data center air conditioning unit.  Far fewer will spend the capital money to build in the true redundancy.  When the stakeholders clearly understand the cost of downtime in hard dollar revenue or credibility, they have the information they need to make the right decision.

Flexibility is the other key factor is the build versus outsource equation.  If your data center is experiencing growth and change, an outsource solution can help eliminate the barriers associated with the changes.  And with an outsource data center solution, you can move your office every few years and suffer little or no impact to your critical systems availability.

Keep in mind that there is no wrong decision when it comes to building your down data center or using and outsource data center facility.  Do your homework and do the math;  you may find it cheaper and more flexible in the long run to throw the data center facilities problem over the wall to 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.