20 Questions About Choosing a Colocation Facility
We answer your colocation questions. Get an introduction to how to choose a colocation facility that addresses
all of the introductory questions you are likely to have.
What Is a Colocation Facility?
A colocation facility is a specialized data center where businesses can house their servers, networking equipment, and storage systems. Instead of maintaining an in-house data center, companies rent space in a colocation facility that provides power, cooling, physical security, and network connectivity.
Colocation allows businesses to maintain control of their hardware while benefiting from enterprise-grade infrastructure.
What is the difference between a colocation facility and the cloud?
- Use colocation to build your own private cloud. A colocation facility can provide the basic requirements you need for high availability. You could use multiple colocation facilities if your business requires geographic diversity. If you want to control your hardware choices and features, your virtualization platform, and your operating environment, this might be the right choice for you. Leverage the colocation provider͛s facility and their access to network services.
- Consider an IAAS engagement for your own private cloud. IAAS stands for Infrastructure As A Service which is a form of cloud computing. The IAAS provider is responsible for the server, network and storage hardware. Depending upon the engagement, you may also purchase the virtualization platform licensing from the provider as well. You avoid any capital expense for the data center or for the IT hardware. You may have a choice in the type of hardware and/or virtualization tools used. You may also have access to the virtualization tools to manage yourself, or the provider may take that responsibility as well.
- Use a public cloud provider. There are public cloud providers who will provide you with access to their cloud platform in increments as small as an hour. You essentially pay for the time you use their assets which can include processing time, various types of software, storage and network access. In most cases, you use whatever hardware the provider uses with little or no choice. And in many cases, you may be using shared resources with other customers of all shapes, types and sizes.
How Does a Colocation Facility Work?
In a colocation environment, businesses install their own IT equipment inside racks or cabinets within a data center. The colocation provider supplies the facility infrastructure, including:
power systems
cooling systems
network connectivity
physical security
monitoring and support
This allows organizations to operate their hardware without maintaining their own data center.
What do you need to know in order to get started with colocation?
Generally speaking, you need to know what your business requires in its hosting plan.
- What are your hardware requirements?
- What are your power requirements?
- What does your budget look like?
- Where do you want to colocate?
- How is your business likely to grow and change in the future?
- What are your network requirements and how will you handle public facing IPs?
Once you’ve answered these questions, you next need to determine which colocation host best fits your needs. While doing so, consider the following:
- How are power and cooling handled?
- What is the facility’s Service-Level Agreement? How will they address unscheduled downtime?
- How scalable are they? How scalable do they need to be?
- How reliable are they?
- How fast can they get your infrastructure up and running?
- Do they have an established presence on the market?
- What type of connectivity do you need? Do you have any pre-existing carrier relationships that you want to maintain such as a private network or MPLS?
- What type of security measures do they take to keep the facility protected?
Is the cloud replacing the colocation industry?
The short answer is no. Although cloud services have taken business from colocation providers, there is nothing to indicate that the colocation industry is dying out. What many people forget is that cloud services and platforms require physical infrastructure to serve as their backbone: even as more businesses move to the cloud, there will still need to be physical servers, and the most efficient place to house them is almost always a colocation facility.
That said, the colocation industry does need to change if providers don’t wish to begin suffering significant losses. As noted by Data Center Knowledge’s Keao Caindec, providers need to start offering easy direct connect, online ordering, commitment-free contracts, and better customer service – all things offered, incidentally, at Liberty Center One.
How much support staff is there in a colocation facility, and how does this compare to cloud computing, dedicated hosting, VPS, etc?
Although the numbers may vary depending on how many clients a particular facility serves, the general answer is ‘as few as possible.’ Consider, for example, Facebook’s recent Rutherford data center – according to a press release from the company, a 300,000 square foot data center creates 35 permanent jobs – that includes sysadmins, network engineers, storage engineers, and security staff. Colocation facilities can be said to have a similar employment density to dedicated hosts and private data centers.
Why is it better for most companies to put their server in a colocation facility than to build their own data center?
The answer is simple: cost. A colocation facility is significantly more cost-effective (and less logistically intensive) than building a private data center. By colocating, you’re paying exclusively for your hardware – and a bit of additional support. A private data center, meanwhile, carries with it expenses such as power, construction, bandwidth, transportation of supplies, and employee payrolls. Your IT staff may be experts in managing servers and storage but it takes different skill sets to manage air conditioners, power systems and generators. All of these functions are taken care of by the colocation provider.
Additionally, by colocating, you gain access to a selection of specialized services that aren’t available if you run your own facility: managed security, for example, and 24/7 technical support.
Colocation also provides economies of scale. A high availability data center has either two of everything or at least one spare for every system. Two of everything equals double the cost. Take for instance, Internet access. To be fully redundant, a company building its own data center would want to contract with two independent network providers for their Internet access. If they only needed one 100 mb/s circuit, they have to purchase two. The colocation provider has relationships with many ISPs and can typically provide redundant Internet access for less the cost of a single circuit due to their purchasing power.
How do colocation facilities charge for rackspace and power, and how does Liberty Center One compare with the rest of the industry?
Colocation providers charge based on the footprint of your rack for space, and by the circuit for power. Although many colocation providers do offer a baseline feed of power with each cabinet or rack, it’s rarely enough for day-to-day operations – especially with denser deployments. Often, this is done to limit rack density.
Liberty Center One’s costs are competitive for an enterprise-focused, high availability facility. We tailor each rack’s power delivery to each customer’s hardware deployment, and provide a wide selection of different circuits depending on our clients’ requirements. Our environment is designed to support power densities beyond 15 kW per rack and our advanced power bus system can easily light up power circuits in minutes, not days.
What Are the Benefits of Using a Colocation Facility?
A colocation facility offers several advantages compared to managing infrastructure in-house.
Key benefits include:
improved reliability and uptime
redundant power and cooling systems
enhanced physical security
scalable infrastructure
access to high-speed network connectivity
These advantages help businesses improve performance while reducing infrastructure risk.
Some businesses that are hosting their computing resources on their own premises are using computer rooms that are not equipped to handle the increased power and cooling load of newer hardware. Outsourcing to a colocation provider avoids the costly upgrade of cooling systems and utility services.
What are some ways to reduce server power consumption?
There are a few measures you can take:
- Ensure your servers are being used efficiently. Consolidate and virtualize as much as you can.
- Use cloud bursting for high-traffic/high-resource periods rather than additional infrastructure.
- Implement an automated load-balancing solution, such as Amazon EC2.
- Use energy-efficient equipment; avoid servers and server components known for high energy usage.
Who Uses Colocation Facilities?
Colocation facilities are commonly used by:
enterprise businesses
software companies
healthcare organizations
financial institutions
cloud service providers
Any organization that requires secure, reliable infrastructure may benefit from colocation.
How does 95th percentile billing work, and what costs can you expect to pay for bandwidth?
When calculating bandwidth costs, a carrier will sample a client’s bandwidth usage roughly every five minutes. This allows us to determine a base data rate for each client, generally calculated in Mbps. With the 95th percentile rule, we discard the highest 5% of our samples for both inbound and outbound traffic.
Billable usage is then determined based on the highest remaining usage. This lets us give our clients the capacity to undergo brief bursts in traffic without being charged extra, while at the same time allowing us to manage overages in a cost-effective fashion. In short, it’s a plan that’s fair for both host and client.
When providing a burstable service, customers are typically put on either 100 mb/s ports or 1 Gb/s ports which allows traffic to burst at those rates when needed. With burstable billing at the 95th percentile however, a customer could burst to their maximum port size (let’s say 1 Gb/s) for up to 36 hours for a typical month and those hours would fall into the top 5% of the samples taken and would therefore be eliminated from the usage calculation. The next highest value becomes the billable rate.
What does a bandwidth provider do, and how are they different from a hosting provider or colocation facility?
A bandwidth provider is exactly what it sounds like. It provides the cabling infrastructure that connects different points of presence, and transports data between facilities. While a hosting provider or colocation facility might provide bandwidth to clients, neither is strictly specialized to provide exclusively bandwidth.
The best analogy for this would be to think of colocation facilities as factories or warehouses, and bandwidth providers as transporters; their business is connectivity rather than computing resources.
What is the difference between a hosting company and a colocation facility?
The difference is actually quite simple: a hosting company sells services, whereas a colocation facility sells server space that might be used to host those services. There’s a bit of overlap, of course, as some colocation providers also offer hosting services separate from server space.
When does it make sense to scale up (upgrade your servers) and when does it make sense to scale out (add more servers)?
While scaling up makes sense for small increases in resource requirements, it’s generally not a better solution than scaling out. This is because scaling up tends to incur far greater short-term costs, and does very little to reduce the risk of hardware failure – and outages as a result of said failure. There’s also a limit to how much you can scale up, as you can only upgrade your hardware so much before there’s nothing left to add.
Scaling out, on the other hand, allows you to scale infinitely. Generally speaking, you’ll always be able to add new servers to your infrastructure, and though it may lead to higher utility costs in the long-term, the short-term costs will be much easier for your business to manage. Scaling out also allows for greater redundancy.
How concerned should you be about the intake temperature (the temperature of the colocation facility and your server rack) and how might it affect your servers?
Provided the facility in which you’re colocating has appropriate HVAC/airflow, not at all. Most colocation providers handle cooling/climate control for the clients. They tend to keep data centers operating within the range of 72-78 degrees Fahrenheit (though Google’s suggested that the optimal temperature could actually be as high as 80 degrees).
Is it a viable business model to host a server (or servers) in a colocation facility and sell off server resources as a web host?
Yes – and in fact, many web hosts actually do just that. Colocation costs less than managing your own data center, and in the long-term, it’s much more cost-effective than operating off of dedicated servers or VPS hosting. Bandwidth costs are also much lower when colocating – a factor that’s extremely important for web hosts. And in case you’re worried about violating some contract, don’t be; when you host your hardware in a colocation facility, it’s yours to use as you see fit.
How does security compare for colocation compared with cloud services?
Strictly speaking, from a client perspective it doesn’t. Cloud computing, since it’s entirely digital, necessitates a greater focus on protecting data in-transit, controlling access, and providing a means of secure connectivity. At the same time, these are all security considerations that are likely to come up if you colocate, as well – especially if your business employs remote workers or outsources its labor.
In addition, while colocation requires servers to be physically secured, this is almost always handled by the host – the client very rarely has to participate in protecting their physical servers.
How Much Does Colocation Cost?
Colocation pricing varies depending on several factors.
Typical cost factors include:
rack space or cabinet space
power usage
bandwidth requirements
additional services
Businesses can often reduce infrastructure costs compared to building and maintaining private data centers.
What are you responsible for if you choose to colocate, as opposed to other forms of hosting?
When you colocate, you’re outsourcing a data center – and you have all the responsibilities that entails. You’re in charge of managing your server’s hardware, including maintenance, installation, upgrades, in-rack power distribution and usage, and access authorization. Compare this to running your own data center where you are also responsible for the physical security, the building management, UPS and generator maintenance, equipment repairs, HVAC operation, and network access.