Colocation :: An Overview

Colocation :: An Overview

Increasingly businesses are recognizing the benefits that come with Colocating their services and mission critical servers with a data centre. Colocation is proving popular for the time and cost savings a company can realize as result of using someone else's facilities. With IT and communications facilities in safe, secure hands, telecommunications, internet, ASP and content providers, as well as enterprises, enjoy faster access to market and the freedom to focus on their core business.

Additionally, customers can reduce their traffic back-haul costs and free up their internal networks for other uses by outsourcing their web site traffic. Moreover, by outsourcing network traffic to a colocation service provider with greater bandwidth capacity, web site access speeds should improve considerably. Ordering of increased network bandwidth is virtually near real-time versus the traditional method of ordering additional facilities to a customer location from the local telecommunications provider.

Basic colocation is where customers will lease rack space and bandwidth, but not the managed service. This is the most popular format today, highlighting the strong demand of businesses to outsource their servers to reduce traffic costs and improve network performance. Being sited on top of a carrier's Internet backbone, colocation minimizes delays in IP traffic flows.

For web hosting applications, the customer's web site resides on a single server or set of servers owned by the customer. As well, fail-save provisions can be made by running servers at multiple co-location facilities. In some cases, the colocation provider offers consulting and professional services, such as web site design, security consulting and technical support capabilities. For these self-serve co-location scenarios, by default, the co-location provider does not touch the customer's servers, data or content. Server administration is done remotely with little hand-on maintenance needed, however, on-site technical staff can provide remote hands and eyes for customers as required.

With so many issues confronting today's fast-growing IP-centric companies, equipment location is one challenge they no longer have to address. Moreover, co-location allows an organization to move into a new geographical market with the minimum of effort - no actual facilities to build, long term leases to commit to, or on-going maintenance involved.

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