Before buying or renting your servers, you need to weigh the benefits of either choice, and make a decision on how to handle your IT Infrastructure. This process requires some planning.
One of the most common difficulties in rationalizing the value of managed services, is undervaluing the time and cost of keeping your server up and running. Sure the server itself is relatively inexpensive but ongoing “hidden” costs will easily exceed its initial purchase price:
Once you understand the hidden costs, you'll be equipped to determine which service is right for you.
This details what your process is when your server malfunctions. These can include troubleshooting and repair or mitigation options, as well as outright part replacements.
Besides what's listed under “housing and protecting”, preventative services include:
Colocation is a service offered by data centers to house, power, cool and protect your servers in a purpose-built facility. This technique includes several benefits over hosting your server from an office:
Colocation provides a multitude of benefits over in-office hosting, without large initial capital costs, all due to the inherent advantages of a data center’s large-scale purpose-built infrastructure. A sustainable datacenter design, and its utilized equipment, will significantly improve your server lifetime, service uptime, deployment timelines, and security of both physical equipment and the data its handling. Colocation enables you to establish known costs; allowing you to predictably forecast needs & associated costs as your business changes. This both speeds and eases the decision-making process. Scalability is another critical benefit to outsourcing your IT infrastructure; when your business grows, there will be no immediate needs to increase head-count, and in the unfortunate event your business shrinks, it's easier to turn off a few outsourced servers, than to deal with laying off expensive and underutilized staff. head count or having to build additions to your own larger data center.
The main difference between colocation and dedicated (leased) server services, is that a dedicated server is owned by your support company (ie: data center) whereas with colocation services the servers are owned by you (the business). Dedicated servers usually include many inherent monitoring and management services, ensuring your server never experiences the unexpected downtime that standard colocation services often encounter. You too can establish the same quality of services, but TOCICI often sees clients colocate servers lacking critical redundancy features…with some managed colocation offerings, much of the same services are available.
Unmanaged colocation only covers first category of server costs, “Housing and Protecting”. This is a hands-off type of service that allows you to take advantage of a data center’s infrastructure, but you are solely responsible if something goes awry with your equipment (ex. your server runs out of memory, disk space, or exceeds processing capacity). Unmanaged colocation services tend to vary between data center operators, but typically it simply provides a safe and secure place to house a server. Features of a data center that factor in to the quality or their tier classification are the following:
The more “disaster proof” a data center becomes, the higher data “tier” it is (ranging from I-IV. IV being the highest). A Tier I data center is considered to be the most prone to failures and downtime whereas a Tier IV data center has the network, power & cooling redundancy in place for resiliency against failures and downtime.
Depending on the Service Level Agreement (SLA) with your data center provider, they can often guarantee a very high percentage of power and network availability (upwards of 99.99%). Depending on how critical uptime is to your company, a good look at your provider’s SLA is critical.
Besides the infrastructure of the data center, the main costs and price motivators of colocation are:
When looking at unmanaged colocation, these are the four things you want to have a good grasp of before going into the purchasing process.
There are a wide variety of services which fall under “managed colocation” but it all start with the previously mentioned unmanaged colocation services as a base. With unmanaged colocation, the server's owner is still responsible for monitoring and tracking, responding to and repairing problems with a server, and taking preventative measures (ie: backups). Managed colocation outsources as many of these operations as you choose, to a data center operator offering these services at a lower cost than most organizations could implement themselves. The cost is lowered, simply thanks to economies of scale; the data center operator fully-utilizes their existing specialized staff to provide:
These outsourced services are extremely valuable to an organization, and provides peace of mind that their equipment is managed through time-tested processes & procedures established to reduce the risk of downtime or data loss, to as close to zero as possible. Managed colocation provides the flexibility to decide what services and procedures you want to outsource and which you want to have more control over.
The flexibility of managed colocation creates an ideal environment for companies desiring their own servers, in a secure and reliable environment, with their data backed up, but while still retaining control over their services and data were something to go wrong. Managed colocation enables you to customize services, creating a perfectly-fitting solution that a traditional dedicated server may not enable.
If you own your own equipment, and seek to achieve the same level of support as that of a dedicated server, managed colocation is a great option. Just ensure that you understand which services are being provided, and which remain your responsibility.
These are all very important questions to ask your managed colocation provider, and should not be overlooked. When it comes to managed colocation, you want to be absolutely certian you're getting what you pay for, and nothing less.
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