Why are companies moving primary data centers to wholesale colocation facilities like Lifeline Data Centers? Part 8

Why are companies moving primary data centers to wholesale colocation facilities like Lifeline Data Centers? Many companies are moving the primary data center to a high uptime wholesale colocation facility, and re-purposing the existing data center as the disaster recovery site.

While this may seem counter-intuitive, there are some nice benefits:

The primary enterprise data center gets all the benefits of wholesale data centers: 99.995% uptime or better, data center power redundancy, multiple data center cooling systems, and carrier neutral access to multiple telecommunications providers. Many companies improve uptime significantly, just by moving into a facility with Rated-4 data center uptime levels.

The existing data center, which may be running out of power, space or cooling, gets new life as the secondary data center. Continued use of an existing asset can benefit a company in a number of ways.

The disaster recovery data center is no longer dependent upon telecom links to be available to users at the data center location. A failure in the telecommunications circuits would allow a company to switch over to the on-site disaster recovery center with little or no need for telecommunications to the outside world.

Why are companies moving primary data centers to wholesale colocation facilities? Wholesale colocation facilities can be used for either primary or disaster recovery data centers. Many companies determine that the primary data center benefits more from the high uptime and carrier flexibility that a outsource data center offers. And they can leverage the existing in-house data center as the disaster recovery data center, in the unlikely event that the colocation facility is lost.

In Part 9 of this series, we’ll address how wholesale colocation can help when a company is centralizing the hub of a wide area network.

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.