Colocation Focus

Tuesday, 01 December 2009 16:37

Waveform's Blog

Data centers come in all shapes and sizes.  Some vary in the physical sense, having sprung from different design philosophies and infrastructure requirements.  Some, on a more simple level, are just more fault tolerant or built to higher specifications then others.  But an important, and often overlooked, consideration to make when selecting a facility for colocation is the data center operator’s focus.  

Some data centers provide colocation as an afterthought to web-hosting or dedicated servers.  Other data centers only offer colocation as a way to bring customers in the door while their real profit areas are in managed services and other value added items.  There are no real right answers here—every customer has their own priorities and needs—but for many companies, finding a colocation provider that focuses only on running the data center is key.  

The afterthought providers often don’t manage their own data center, but rent space in order to support their primary means of business, be it virtual private servers, e-commerce hosting, or any other number of Internet services.  Occasionally these companies find themselves with extra space in their racks and resell that space as colocation in order to offset their costs.  

Colocating with a reseller isn’t necessarily bad, but often problems can arise.  Often a reseller and their customers find themselves directly competing with each other—as in the case where a web-host resells colocation space to a smaller web-host—which can create various conflicts of interest.  Additionally, the afterthought provider is often unwilling or unable to provide colocation at the same cost as the data center operator, who doesn’t have the added overhead in his cost structure.  

The value added providers are interested in providing colocation only as a means to acquire more managed services customers.  These providers, when they operate a data center, do so to support their own list of IT consultation services.  These products may range from network design, to server monitoring and management, to disaster recovery, and website design.  (Look out for the Swiss Army Knife IT company that claims to do everything.)  

These services may be useful for many individuals and companies, especially those who need some extra hand holding—but companies who already posses the right skill set can often save money by going with a data center that has a more hands off approach.  Additionally, some managed services can limit the freedom of the colocation customer—such as the value added provider’s firewall that blocks needed traffic—and create difficult troubleshooting situations.  

As for us at Waveform, we’re the colocation only, unmanaged, hands-off type.  We run our data center in order to provide our customers with high quality colocation at a reasonable price—that’s our focus.