Why are companies moving primary data centers to wholesale colocation facilities like Lifeline Data Centers? Part 3

Why are companies moving primary data centers to wholesale colocation facilities like Lifeline Data Centers? Better uptime, also known as higher computer reliability, is a driving reason.

Regardless of size, companies continue to bet their business on the reliability of their computer systems. The cost of downtime is lost revenue, lost credibility, and in the worst case, lost clients.

How do companies avoid downtime with in-house data centers? By building the same data center redundancies that outsource providers use. N+N data center redundancy means that a company employs two of everything for their critical data center support systems: two utility power feeds, two generators, two UPS systems and two HVAC systems.

But building data centers with N+N redundancy is expensive. And companies often times cut corners when the actual building occurs. I cannot tell you how many times we have seen in-house data centers change plans and end up with one generator, even though two were planned in the original design. Very few companies go to the expense of two utility feeds from the power company. For each corner cut, the risk of downtime increases significantly.

Why are companies moving primary data centers to wholesale colocation facilities? Higher uptime. Data center redundancy for in-house data centers is expensive. Companies often cut corners to keep costs down, increasing the risks of downtime. The outsource data centers that are built to Rated-4 data center standards deliver 99.995% uptime or better. That’s less than 32 minutes of downtime per year or less. Outsource data centers with N+N power redundancy and redundant data center cooling can help companies improve to 99.995% uptime just by moving equipment to the data center.

In Part 4 of this series, we’ll address how the need for data center compliance or data center certifications has become a reason to move to a wholesale colocation facility.

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.