Why Businesses Choose a Data Center Colocation Over Building Their Own

 
A data center collocation is a type of data center where equipment space and bandwidth are available for rental to retail customers. Colocation facilities provide space, power, cooling, and physical security for the server, storage, and networking equipment of other firms –and connect them to a variety of telecommunications and network service providers at a minimal cost and minimal level of complexity.

Colocation has become popular especially as an option for midsize-IT needs, especially those in internet related businesses. This is because it allows the company to focus its IT staff on the actual work being done, instead of the logistical support needs which underlie the work. Significant benefits of scale (large power and mechanical systems) result in large collocation facilities.

Colocation centers provide many resources for their users:

• Network connectivity –either in a “house blend” where the collocation provider is a customer of carriers and connects their clients to their own router or as a direct “cross-connect”
• Real-time live monitoring of all functions
• Higher reliability due to redundant systems
• 24/7 monitoring by engineers
• Lower network latency and higher bandwidth at a lower cost
• Specialist staff, like network and facilities engineers, which would not be cost effective for any single client to keep

Why use a collocation center over building your own data center? Many enterprises would rather use a collocation center for disaster recovery and redundancy, to host a customer-facing website or for a testing environment for new projects. For example, a new web site owner could place the site’s own computer servers on the premises of the Internet service provider ISP.