Colocation is the act of physically moving your servers into a data centre. Redcentric has been operating leading-edge UK data centres for over 30 years. We’ve never had a power outage and we guarantee 99.999% network uptime at 9 UK data centres. Our expertise has helped hundreds of organisations like yours.
Data centres are at the centre of the modern technology industry. Failing to take advantage of the efficiency and new technologies that data centres offer will lead to your business being left behind when it comes to your IT services.
Colocation provides the opportunity for smaller companies to use a third-party data centre, but there are many factors to weigh up to decide whether it’s a good fit for your company or not.
Colocation is the act of moving your servers and other IT equipment into a third-party data centre. This is much cheaper (and significantly less challenging) than building your own data centre, but there is a host of other benefits as well.
The basics of colocation:
Create room to grow – Your in-house servers take up a lot of expensive office space (especially in London). Moving your IT equipment into a colocation data centre will not only give you more office space (and therefore help you save costs), but if you DO have to move, you don’t have to worry about moving your servers again.
Power supply redundancies – Data centres use UPSs (Uninterruptable Power Supply) and generators to protect equipment from power failure, which guarantees your IT systems keep running and prevents any damage a power failure could cause.
Your IT infrastructure can grow – If you need to expand your IT equipment beyond the space you have in your office, this could stifle your ability to operationally grow the business. Once you move to rack space in a colocation data centre, you’ll never have to worry about finding more rackspace.
Connectivity options – In a world of hybrid-working, running essential computer systems off your standard office broadband is a recipe for disaster for your remote workers. The internet connectivity in a data centre will be a significant upgrade as they operate ultra-fast, carrier-neutral and highly resilient fibre networks.
Peace of mind – Tier 3 data centres deploy sophisticated ‘concurrently maintainable’ (i.e. highly resilient) power, cooling, and internet connectivity systems. You don’t need to worry about an outage if one component (i.e. an air-con unit) fails, as there are multiple redundant systems in place to pick up the slack.
Efficient Cooling Systems – Lots of servers generate a lot of heat, and cooling them can be very expensive. Data centres run a lot more efficiently than traditional air conditioning units, which keeps costs down.
Lower costs – There is a number of ways that colocation services with a data centre will save you money. Their efficiency will reduce your energy-related costs, and they’ll give you more flexibility around your internet speeds and billing, as well as protecting you from downtime.
Enabling AI and VFX – The use of HPC (high-performance computing) for things like AI and VFX has grown significantly recently. However, HPC set-ups require extensive infrastructure to run, so for most companies, the only way to use them is by utilising a specialist HPC data centre like our Gatwick site.
24-hour monitoring & remote hands – With round-the-clock monitoring and a remote hands service, Colocation in a data centre means someone will be able to quickly fix an issue no matter what time of day or night it happens. This reduces downtime and saves your engineers a lot of time and effort.
With the rise of big data analytics, machine learning and AI there has been an increasing demand for businesses to adopt high-performance computing (HPC). HPC is the advanced computing technology that supports advanced digital technologies.
Since HPC has intense power and cooling requirements, it might be that the simplest way for your business to deploy it is in an HPC-ready colocation data centre where storage space is not an issue and where the environment is perfectly adapted the needs of HPC.
Traditional medium density CPU storage will require a power deployment of around 3 to 7 kW per rack.
HPC clusters of CPU and GPU cores demand 20 to 40 kW per rack, increasing the heat load drastically.
HPC’s high power draw means it also requires specialist cooling.
At Redcentric we offer immersion cooling hosting, a highly-efficient method of submerging servers in liquid. We also have rear-door cooling to suit whatever your HPC needs are.
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Placing your servers into a colocation data centre means you are now relying on their security protocols and not your own. While this takes a lot of pressure off you and your business, you still need to fully understand what security is in place around your equipment.
Making sure that no one gains physical access to your servers is vital to protect the data stored on them. If you are recording people’s details, then GDPR makes it your responsibility to ensure this protection is in place, and their information isn’t misused (or misplaced).
The required security measures for certain data can be difficult and expensive to implement in your own office, but data centres will have physical security measures built-in.
At Redcentric we provide:
Some data centres also offer cyber security services >
One of the biggest advantages of colocation is that it significantly reduces your downtime thanks to excellent levels of resiliency.
Connectivity – Data centres provide their internet services in a carrier-neutral way, meaning that they’re connected to several different internet providers. When a network goes down, the data centre will always have others to rely on. Additionally, the physical network cables leaving the data centre will do so in a geographically diverse way to eliminate the risk of something like construction work from severing their internet.
Power Failure – Data centres are equipped with Uninterruptable Power Supplies (UPS) and generators so that their servers stay powered even if there is a main failure. UPS’s are effectively giant batteries that keep everything powered until the generators kick in.
Using colocation services with a data centre is an opportunity to save money for your business. The pricing of colocation depends on a few factors, and these are:
The amount of space – The racks in data centres are typically measured by their height, and the unit used is ‘U’. Data centres will usually offer racks in three sizes: quarter racks, which are 11U in height; half racks, which are 22U in height; and full racks, which can range from 42 to 48U in height. Use our calculator to see what size rack you need.
The level of SLA – Data centres which provide comprehensive SLAs regarding system up-time will be more expensive, so you’ll need to decide how much downtime you can afford. Additionally, things like 24-hour access and remote hands will require you going to a more expensive data centre.
Power requirements – Data centres will charge based on energy consumption due to the high costs of power. Typically, a full rack will take anything up to 24 amps of power, and this is considered normal power density. If your power requirements are higher than this, it is considered higher power density, and the extra energy (to run and to cool these servers) will lead to additional costs.
Location – Location is important, but data centres located in major cities or capital cities are usually between 30-40% more expensive than those found in non-metro areas. But there are also other advantages to using a data centre outside of a city.
Interested in a quote for colocation?
If you are considering colocation you’ll need to start comparing data centres to see which offers the best colocation.
You can use our data centre checklist for the 22 essentials your colo facility should have, to check through and make sure the data centre you’re looking at has everything it should.
You also need to decide which tier of data centre would be best. Data centres tiers range from tier 1 (least resilient) to tier 4 (most resilient) and the most common in the UK is tier 3, which strikes a strong balance between resilience and cost. Read our explanation of data centre tiers.
When it comes to digital transformation, specifically upgrading your on-premises servers to a managed infrastructure service, colocation vs cloud are the main options.
The big difference between colocation and cloud, with both of them being hosted in a data centre, is that you keep ownership of your servers in colocation, but with cloud your provider is responsible for all of the hardware. While one isn’t inherently better than the other, one might be a better fit for your business for one of the following reasons:
Due to cloud’s ability to rapidly scale, and no need for capital investment, it’s where a lot of businesses start with their IT. However, it can grow unsuitable over time for several reasons including:
When this happens, the best option is to repatriate systems off the cloud. Colocation is incredibly valuable here since you don’t need to start housing your IT yourself, and you still retain an excellent level of resiliency.
Modern digital technology is incredibly advanced and is only growing more so over time. Thankfully, you don’t actually have to choose between colocation and cloud, you can add additional platforms to your colocation to achieve everything you need. Hybrid-IT is a work-load first way of running your IT where different applications are hosted on different platforms and you never need to compromise.
Hybrid-IT is an IT system where different platforms (e.g. colocation, private cloud, public cloud, etc.) are combined into one integrated system.
Colocation provides excellent resiliency and reliability, all with the security of storing data on your own personal hardware. If you have highly sensitive or proprietary data then colocation is an essential part of your IT. But combining it with the flexibility and expandability of cloud means your hybrid IT system can be the best of both worlds.
There are a lot of different ways to host your IT system, and there isn’t one correct answer, but colocation could help upgrade your IT’s reliability and security while reducing costs. Taking advantage of a data centre’s infrastructure while retaining your own hardware has a wide variety of benefits, so you just need to see if you have the capacity and the need in your digital transformation strategy for this and then incorporate colocation into the plan if you do.
If your business is at the right stage in your development to look into colocation, then make sure you follow the advice in our ‘How to choose a data centre’ section. When you start comparing, you can find Redcentric’s colocation offerings here. We have Surrey and Sussex data centres, with facilities also available in Kent and London. If we’re a good match for you, then please get in touch with one of our experts for advice and a bespoke quote.
