Right now we are in discussions with a client about using our outsource data center first as an addition to their enterprise data center, then as a disaster recovery colocation.

The company is experiencing chronic problems with their in-house enterprise data center.  Downtime has been a problem because they are at the top end of their capacity for both power and cooling.  The slightest problem can shut down a significant portion of their systems for hours.  In one case, they had multiple days of downtime with a few of their critical systems.

The company has made the decision to build a brand new enterprise data center, but it won’t be ready for 18 months.  They need to solve their immediate problem of reducing the risk of further downtime.  So they are looking at affordable colocation in a hardened data center facility in the near term as a temporary home for their most critical systems.  Once they get the new large data center built, they will move all of the production systems to the new facility, then create a real-time disaster recovery center in the outsource data center.

This "leapfrog" approach is more common than you might think.  When the risks and costs of downtime are high, moving critical systems to a 99.995% uptime data center is an easy decision.