In simple terms, colocation (also known as outsourced data center or wholesale colocation) is high-tech real estate. Companies use colocation to solve the problems of hardened data center buildings, power, cooling, telecommunications and security. Companies use colocation to solve these problems without losing any control of their IT infrastructure and systems. Colocation is about control of IT without the worry of building facilities.

Cloud computing comes in many forms. Companies use cloud computing to access applications and resources without owning hardware or maintaining an IT staff . Cloud computing is about applications and solutions without the worry of IT staff, IT infrastructure, and building facilities.

When comparing cloud computing providers, make sure you understand the incremental costs. Simpler pricing models are usually better. Understand the built-in backup systems and redundancies and how you can build in higher reliability if you need to.

When shopping amongst colocation providers, make sure you understand the incremental costs. Simpler data center pricing models are usually better. Keep costs low by choosing a provider with low power costs. Midwest colocation providers tend to have lower data center power costs than other areas of the United States. Affordable colocation is available in many regions of the country. Most companies today look for a minimum 99.995% uptime carrier neutral data centers with no cross connect fees.

Use colocation to maintain control of your applications and infrastructure without the worries of building facilities. Use cloud computing when you’re looking to solve application problems with a minimum of IT overhead.

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Your purchasing department would probably say yes. Your legal department might too. One throat to choke. They’re looking at the problem from a vendor management perspective, and fewer vendors is better. Or is it?

Ask yourself these questions:

What if you love the data center facility but the quality of the IT services offered are marginal?

What if you already have vendors for specific IT services?

What if you prefer to choose best of breed vendors for specific projects and technical support?

What if your staff does most of the IT work?

Would it be more sensible to separate the choice of data center provider from the choice of IT services provider?

Most companies that choose wholesale data centers over self-built data centers make the decision based on the uptime they get per dollar spent. That’s because these pure data centers, also known as wholesale colocation, concentrate on one thing: mission critical facilities. 99.995% uptime requires incredible attention to detail with hardened data center buildings, redundant power, cooling, telecom access, and data center regulatory compliance. But not all colocation providers are alike; data center reliability varies greatly based on the companies power, cooling, telecom systems, and compliance. If data center uptime is important, then the sensible approach would be to pick the best-designed facility for your needs.

Does it make sense to reject the best-fit data center facilities provider because they don’t do router work, or AS/400 support, or eCommerce platform support? The answer could be yes. It depends on your organization’s applications and your own staff’s talent in supporting these business-specific applications and their platforms. When considering full-service providers, make sure that you understand the quality of the data center behind the provider’s services. You have the option to pick your own wholesale colocation facility and require your vendors to support the hardware in your colocation space.

If you’re purchasing rack space from a full-service provider, you may be paying too much for your colocation space. Especially if your provider maintains a large staff of IT Support Engineers. Bench time is expensive, and unless these Engineers are fully utilized, your rack space pays for part of the Engineers’ wages. Make sure you consider competitive pricing from other colocation facilities. Data center pricing models are excellent indicators of what vendors value and how they handle their overhead.

Your outsource data center provider does not have to be your IT services provider. You have options. You can choose the best among data center vendors with a little homework.

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Most companies who need new high uptime data center space compare the costs of building their own primary data center in a company building versus using wholesale colocation facilities, aka outsource data centers.

So what does high uptime mean? Uptime is the measured value in minutes of a company’s computer systems reliability. 99.995% uptime means 28 minutes of downtime per year or less. Companies who value uptime know that downtime causes lost sales, lost profits, and lost clients. These companies haveoften learned about the costs of data center downtime the hard way. Some unlikely circumstance caused an outage that was painful enough for leadership to reevaluate the importance of the server room to the success of the company.

But the cost of uptime is high. A small in-house data center with 99.995% uptime can easily reach $1 million in capital costs, and tens of thousands in staffing, yearly maintenance, SAS 70 and SSAE 16 data center certifications.

What does affordable mean? Here are three characteristics:

Simple data center pricing model – Can you understand how the pricing works? Are there multiple add-on charges and mysterious extra monthly fees?

Predictable – Predictable pricing models make it easy to forecast growth and change. How complex is a three year analysis of your costs? Are there multiple variable costs?

Incremental- Incremental means pay as you use it. Can you grow the number of racks and pay accordingly? Do you pay for electricity as you use it, or based on the circuit size?

The good news: you can have your cake and eat it too. You can meet tier IV data center uptime requirements and still keep data center outsource costs low. The bad news: there are only a few Midwest colocation facilities that offer high data center uptime at affordable pricing. Do your homework and you’ll find flexible affordable colocation with high data center uptime.

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Many factors play in to the selection secondary data center and office space locations. A good CIO strategy includes multiple geographies in an evaluation of disaster recovery centers. For some organizations Midwest colocation outside of Chicago might be a better solution.

Standard features that many organizations look for when considering disaster recovery centers include:

Hardened data center facilities – With Midwest colocation, F5 tornado resistant data centers building are important, along with earthquake resistant facilities in some areas.

99.995% uptime or better – This is the uptime level expected from Tier IV data centers. Some IT professionals consider the uptime is a DR center to be less important than in the primary data center. If your organization is doing real-time or near-real time data replication, data center uptime in your disaster recovery center is likely as important as in your primary enterprise data center.

Multiple carriers with no cross-connect fees – Access to multiple telecom carriers ensures diverse and reliable connectivity in the event of a disaster, or on an ongoing basis with real-time replication. Data centers with no monthly cross connect fees significantly reduce ongoing costs.

Data center compliance and certification – Compliance and certifications in the disaster recovery center are just as important as the primary data center.

Data center pricing model – Simple is better. Most organizations seem to prefer to pay for power, cooling and space incrementally as they use it.

Advantages to Midwest data centers located outside of Chicago include:

• Geographic diversity, especially for Chicago-based organizations.
• Overall lower costs, including, lower data center power costs, lower costs of construction labor, and lower data center capital costs.
• A theoretically lower risk from placing the disaster recovery center outside of one of the USA’s five largest cities.

Wholesale colocation providers offer the most flexibility for organizations that prefer to own and control their own telecom connections, network, servers and storage. Some wholesale data centers offer disaster recovery office space. This space can be custom fit by the organization to use for emergency call centers or workspace recovery.

Considering disaster recovery options in Chicago? Consider Midwest colocation providers outside of Chicago in your search.

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In the early days of colocation (the mid-1990s) many colocation providers grew out of the telecommunications space. A Director of Operations at a local telecom branch office probably looked at some empty space in his building. He then called the Sales Manager and asked if he could find a client who might be interested in renting the space. The Sales Manager found a client, so they had to come up with a pricing model. As many of us already know, telecom providers have some of the most complex and convoluted pricing models of any vendor. Many of the complexities of telecom pricing models came to the colocation world. Colocation seems to have been born with a complex pricing model.

How many line items are on the typical monthly colocation invoice? I’ve had clients who use other data centers tell me that they have 10 line items to rent a single cabinet and a little bandwidth.

But an outsource data center is really not that complex. All colocation facilities provide real estate, power, cooling, and access to bandwidth. Midwest colocation provides hardened data center facilities and F5 tornado resistant data centers. West coast colocation is often earthquake resistant. The offerings seem simple enough. Why should the colocation pricing models be complex?

Here are some features to look for in a pricing model:

How is real estate delivered? Many outsource computer room providers dictate the amount of floor space each rack is allocated. Some allow you to purchase extra space for a less dense footprint or for growth over time. Does the data center give you the flexibility you need to grow and change?

Is the power pricing based on actual draw? It is common for outsourced data center providers to bill based on a circuit size rather than the actual power used by a client. This circuit size billing method is inherently inequitable, because power needs shift over time, and circuit utilization is never more than 50% in a highly reliable data center. Look for pay-as-you-use-it power pricing.

How is the power for cooling calculated? Data center equipment (servers, network gear and storage) require about 1 kW of cooling for each 1 kW of power to operate the equipment. Does the pricing model charge you for the cooling power in a sensible manner?

How is the capital overhead of generators, UPS systems, HVAC charged? Every rack in every data center uses a portion of the power and cooling infrastructures, along with the staffing and the data center compliance overhead. Are you being charged fairly for your share of these complex and expensive infrastructures?

Does the colocation provider charge monthly cross-connect fees? Many data centers offer access to multiple carriers. But most charge you a monthly fee for the privilege of connecting to these carriers. A few data centers charge no cross connect fees. This can be a huge savings over time, especially when companies employ multiple carriers in a complex wide area network.

Use these features to compare data center outsource costs. A simple data center pricing model lets you understand what you’re spending, better forecast changes, and control the overall cost of operating your data center.

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If your organization

• operates a private cloud
• delivers cloud services
• uses a combination of cloud and internal services

you may want to consider a wholesale data center as the center or hub of your cloud infrastructure.

Outsource data centers can deliver 99.995% uptime. That’s 28 minutes of data center downtime per year or less. You can leverage the data center power and cooling redundancy in an F5 tornado resistant data center without having to spend the capital costs to build your own.

You can maintain the control of your own servers, network and storage without worrying about hardened data center buildings, power, cooling, data center security, and fire suppression.

You can build a primary, secondary, or high-availability computer room that meets SAS 70 data center requirements along with other data center certifications and compliance, without having to use internal resources for compliance.

You can choose which telecommunications providers best suit your needs, in order to build a reliable, cost-effective wide area network.

You can leverage data center power costs by choosing Midwest colocation facilities with lower kilowatt hour costs .

Which wholesale data center is the right place to build your cloud computing data center? Consider these criteria:

• Is the outsource data center provider growing? Look for large, successful data center facilities with room to grow.
• Who owns the data center? Are the owners involved in the day-to-day operations?
• What’s the track record of the business? How long have they been building and operating data centers?
• What level of data center uptime is the provider offering? 99.995% uptime is the promised service level of a tier IV data center.
• Does the provider offer shared space, private cages or private suites? Can you bring your own cabinets? Do they offer optional office space? More options are better.
• What are your choices for telecommunications? If you need flexibility, you need a carrier neutral data center that offers access to many carriers. Look for facilities with no cross connect fees to keep monthly costs low.
• Look for a usage-based power pricing model with low per kilowatt hour pricing. Midwest data centers often have the best power pricing because of lower power costs in the region.
• Look for affordable colocation facilities can deliver 99.995% with a pay as you grow data center pricing model.

If you’d like to build more reliability and predictable costs into your data center, call Lifeline Data Centers at 317.423.2591.

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Your data center is probably more important to your business than it was 10 years ago. Organizations of all sizes have come to expect 99.995% uptime (the same level as a Tier IV data center) to keep revenues flowing and to retain customers, and to communicate with key vendors.

But it is shockingly expensive to build an enterprise data center with such requirements. Some of the requirements to meet such high levels of uptime include:

• Hardened data center facilities: In Midwest data centers, F5 tornado resistant data centers are important.
• Data center power redundancy: Can you afford two utility feeds, two generators, and two UPS systems?
• Data center cooling redundancy: You’ll need at least two air conditioning systems with double the air conditioning your require.
• Data center compliance and certifications: Vendors, clients and the government are requiring expensive certifications such as SAS 70 certified data centers and TIA 942 compliant data centers.
• Security: Physical data center security includes the costs, implementation and maintenance of access cards, PIN pads, locking cabinets, and security cameras with staffing to monitor them.

Some companies choose to “get out of the hardware business” and move their critical applications to cloud service providers like Rackspace and Amazon. Many find that the cost of such a move can be expensive, variable, and hard to forecast.

Other companies choose the high-tech landlord route. They search for an outsource data center with key features:

Experience – Companies are choosing outsource colocation facilities that have a track record
Leadership – Are the owners involved in day-to-day operations?
Carrier neutral data center – Multiple telecom providers are available
No cross-connect fees – No monthly fees to remain connected to the telecom carriers
Simple data center pricing model – Easy to understand and easy to forecast
Ability to grow and change – Can you get extra space if you need it?

Do you have the IT expertise you need to make your business successful? Do you need a venue to deliver your mission critical applications? If the answer is yes, contact a high-tech landlord to find out more.

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It’s an expensive proposition. You might want to investigate your options, including infrastructure as a service (IaaS) , and outsource data center facilities, also known as colocation.

IaaS give you the ability to get out of the computer hardware business. You can move your server images to a shared, virtualized environment and run your servers from the cloud. This is very attractive to many businesses, because of low capital costs and low internal employee requirements.

Colocation, also known as outsource data center, provides hardened data center buildings, reliable power, cooling and access to telecommunications. Many companies move their primary data centers to colocation facilities. These companies reap many benefits from colocation:

99.995% uptime, if the facility meets Tier IV data center uptime standards
Fully redundant data center power and cooling for minimal downtime
Data center security including multiple factor authentication, background checks and physical access control
Access to multiple telecommunications providers

A few outsource data centers offer additional benefits:
Private cages for workspace and growth
Pay-as-you-grow pricing
Carrier neutral data centers with many telecom providers and competitive pricing
No monthly cross connect fees, so telecom pricing is reduced even further
Private office space for business continuity or primary offices

Moving your data center to an affordable colocation facility can be the last data center move you need to make. For many businesses, it makes financial sense to de-couple the data center location from the location of the business headquarters.

Want to learn more? Call Midwest data center facilities provider Lifeline Data Centers at 317.423.2591.

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Benefits

Higher uptime – Outsource colocation (another name for outsource data center) providers offer highly reliable facilities with 99.995% uptime, which translates to 28 minutes of downtime per year or less. Outsource data centers help you solve the power, cooling, fire suppression and security problems separately from Information Technology specific problems.

Lower costs – Outsource data center pricing models that allow you to pay-as-you-grow let you manage costs and forecast growth. Incremental pricing models help IT organizations and cloud service providers to build effective ad meaningful cost models for budgeting and charge back.

Better compliance – Companies leverage outsource data center certifications to avoid the costs of certifying internal data center facilities. Are your clients asking for SAS 70 data centers, Tier IV data centers, HIPAA, FISMA, and PCI compliance? Are you willing to bear the resource and financial burdens of maintaining compliance and related data center certifications?

Risks

Managing off-site data center facilities can be complex, whether the data center is for primary production systems or secondary, backup systems.

Moving data center facilities is a complex process. Some companies cannot stand any sort of outage or downtime for their computer systems. Moving to an outsource data center is a complex project.

Choosing the wrong outsource data center provider can be an expensive proposition. What are the key components? 99.995% uptime, a flexible data center pricing model, no cross-connect fees, SAS 70 data center compliance are good places to start.

Do the benefits of using outsource computer room facilities outweigh the risks your organization? Call the data center strategy experts to learn more.

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Checklist for 99.995% uptime

Choose a hardened data center facility
Data centers should be designed to protect against the most common risks of the region. With Midwest colocation providers, F5 tornado resistant data centers are important.

Understand the data center power infrastructure
Power is the most common cause of downtime for both in-house and outsourced data centers. Study how the data center has designed the power system. Look for two power feeds, two generators, 2 UPS systems, and at least two outlets per rack. Power should be totally separate for each power feed to the rack.

Understand the data center cooling redundancy model
For data center uptime, cooling is a slightly lower risk than electrical power, but equally important. Without cooling, servers and network equipment will shut off or fail in just a few minutes. Cooling systems should not only be duplicated, they should be designed to be concurrently maintainable.

Understand the telecommunications paths and redundancies
Telecommunications circuits are critical components of uptime. Two or more entrances for telecommunications circuits allows you to build diverse path communications into your data center. Does the data center have two entrances?

Look at the data center downtime track record
Forget the design for a moment. What is the actual downtime track record of the data center? Single power feed failures should be designed to be a non-issue. Is that what has happened in actual practice?

Checklist for affordable colocation

Look for a simple data center pricing model
Colocation pricing models are often complex. Variable charges, too many line items, and overages can make costs variable and unpredictable. Look for providers with a simple data center pricing model. Floor space, active racks, and power usage should be the building blocks of the data center pricing. Watch out for telecommunications monthly cross-connect fees, along with other monthly add-on fees.

Pay for power as you use it
Any other power pricing model is likely to be in the provider’s favor.

Find a facility in a region with low data center power costs
Midwest colocation has some of the lowest power in the nation. You must clearly understand how power is measured and billed.

Find a carrier neutral data center
Access to more telecom carriers is better. Carrier neutral data centers offer multiple providers with no favoritism.

Find a data center with no cross connect fees
A few wholesale data centers provide access to telecom carriers with no monthly add-on fees. If your wide area network is complex, savings in cross-connect fees can pay for your colocation costs.

The real benefit comes when you find an wholesale colocation facility with both high data center uptime and affordable pricing. These data centers are rare. In the Midwest colocation market, Lifeline Data Centers fills the need. Interested in learning more? 317.423.2591.

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