Colocation - saving cost and creating business opportunity

  by Charles Rattray | 12 Jan 2009 | Permalink |

Colocation centers offer their customers’ data center facilities in the form of space, power, cooling, and internal and external network connectivity in a safe, secure and managed environment. In turn customers using colocation facilities to house their IT equipment, namely servers, storage, network and telecommunication facilities buy into the colocation approach for the reduced risk and cost benefits that it can provide.

Increasingly, web commerce companies who seek redundant internet connectivity; telecommunication companies who seek to interexchange traffic with potential clients; and large businesses seeking to protect against disaster and loss of business continuity, have all been buying into the collocation experience. The underlying philosophy here is – why maintain real estate and expensive security, power and cooling facilities, when the costs can be shared with many other customers and the day to day benefits of these environments can be managed by data center experts?

For the collocation providers, managing multiple server environments for disparate customers from within one data center means more than just providing the facilities. Recent drives toward greener IT and customers’ daily demands to uncover cost savings and present new business opportunities mean that colocation providers have even greater need to pay close attention to the technology their customers are running in the data center. Likewise, customers trusting the core systems that their lines of business depend upon need to know that server and software dependencies designed into the business service solution remain in place, and are not compromised by poor collocation hosting practices.

Recent thinking in data center practices touts the idea that running applications only during relevant business hours can dramatically reduce IT spend on power and cooling. This approach goes against the grain of the majority of system administrators who have spent decades focusing on availability and uptime. While the debate continues, Tideway Foundation provides a measurable way for colocation companies to see what is running in their data centers, and what that means for space, power and cooling demand forecasting. At the same time, Tideway Foundation allows end customers to literally see their business services and how they may be impacted by the facilities being provided by the collocation firm. The result for both the supplier and customer is that foundation provides a common source of information for identifying and planning cost saving benefits. While tackling the issue of switching off idle applications may be low in the priority list, at a minimum those making use of Tideway Foundation data will see immediate cost saving opportunities.

Having a closer view of what their customers are running within the colocation facilities also means more new business opportunities for the collocation provider. The ability to see what customers need and to build on-add services allows them to provide the all important additional value – the differentiator between them and their competitors. As collocation customers become more knowledgeable about their own systems, switching hosting companies to one providing more value at lower cost becomes less of a headache and more of a realistic cost saving and value gaining exercise.