Choosing a colocation is no less than choosing a business
partner. You need to be assured of the commitment, the transparency of
operations and last but not least, a long lasting dedication to the vision.
Housing your mission-critical business application at
someone else's facility is a big decision and needs a careful discretion and
long term planning. You may want to be 100% certain that your infra partner in
terms of colocation services is something
you can trust 24x7.
Some of the salient features of a stellar colocation service
are:
1.
Physical location of the colocation
service
Location is one of the most important factors to consider.
All other parameters are dependent heavily on the choice of location. While
assessing the location of a colocation service, you need to consider in which
area is the service physically located and how far it is from your company. The
idea is how easily it would be for you to manage in terms of any routine upgrade,
or service your equipment or any new installations. It doesn’t have to be in
your city, but most probably in your own country. The other important factor to consider is if the
colocation service area has belts of natural disasters like hurricanes, floods,
earthquakes, and tornadoes. The last factor to consider is the ecosystem and if
there is adequate arrangement of power supply to ensure continuous operations.
2.
Flexibility and Expansion Capability of
the services
It basically points to how scalable are the services to your
growing operations. How customized the services bundling is. How the customized
service model is going to affect your Capex and OpEX. You may want to ensure that
your service partner has the capability to cater to your growing business
demands together with a competitive pricing.
3. Reliability of service
The reliability is measured as uptime in the world of data
centers.A service can only be reliable most of the times. A reliable provider should have five 9s
uptime, meaning they are reliable at least 99.999% of the time. One of the ways
to ensure a trusted reliability is to check any customer feedback if available.
4. Ease of deployment of services
How fast can you push your services on the environment with
long delay and disruptions in the services? How one can cross-connect or add an
additional rackspace on demand as in the demands in business dynamic and scale
up anytime!The answer lies in the efficacy to deliver with high scalability and
minimum disruption. Make sure you have clear timelines when it comes to pushing
up the scalability and transition of your services demand.
5. Network Ecosystem
Seamless network connectivity is the backbone of colocation
services and rest all would be meaningless without it. It’s like a gun without
bullets. In fact the biggest advantage of colocation lies in the ability to network
with partners, distributors or even competitors for peering with low latency.
To ensure a thorough check, you may want to ensure if the facility is
carrier-neutral and if the colocation service provider has a decent enough ecosystem
of customers already interconnecting with each other that is a clear sign of trusted services.
Choosing a colocation center is thus a critical issue and
you may also want to ensure the financial stability of your service provider
before committing your years of vision as a partnership with your vendor.
Ideally your data center should be able to
support you for at least 5 years if not longer. It would also matter how many
other vendors are there around the same location to have an assessment of the
market of colocation services in the area.
Choosing a colocation is a major step in shaping your IT and
thus business strategy to eliminate the expense of building or upgrading your
own facility. Thus to choose your colocation data center wisely, you may want
to evaluate various vendors in terms of service costs, connectivity and service-level
agreements.