Four Reasons Your Servers Belong In a Co-location Facility

Renting space and bandwidth from a co-location facility can be more cost effective and offer greater reliability than storing and provisioning your servers "for free" at your small or midsize business

If your public-facing Web server or e-mail server is somewhere in your office, you might consider moving it, and some of your other servers, to a co-location facility. In most cases, in my experience, the best place for smaller and midsize companies to locate their Internet server is outside the company -- in a dedicated facility that offers a more server-friendly environment than a rack in a back room of your office.

I'm not talking here about "shared hosting" services where you place your Web site an Internet service provider for something like $25 or $50 per month. No, I'm suggesting that many of your servers that you own (purchased from companies like HP or Dell), loaded up with software you're written and licensed, would do better if you take them out of your office, and drive them over to a co-location facility.

A co-location facility is, essentially, a modern data center, similar to what a large enterprise would have -- except that it rents out space in its racks to customers, who are referred to as tenants. After you rent space, you install your own servers, switches, and other hardware onto those racks, going there in person to do installations and maintenance. As part of your rent, the co-lo (pronounced "coe-low") provides power, heating, cooling, and Internet connectivity.

You may find renting space and bandwidth from a co-lo to be more cost effective and offer greater reliability than storing and provisioning your servers "for free" at your business office.

Four Big Reasons
Why should you pay a co-location facility to store and provision your servers? Here are the top four reasons.

·                                 1. Design: Co-location facilities are purpose-built facilities with well-designed power, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC). With their backup electrical generators and HVAC facilities, they probably can keep your servers powered up and cooled down better than you can. (That's especially true if your office building loses power a lot, or if it doesn't have really good central air conditioning 24x7.)

·                                 2. Bandwidth: Co-los have massive bandwidth. I know too many companies that spend a fortune running T-1, DSL or even cable modem lines into their offices, mainly to feed a hungry Web server. By contrast, many co-los have redundant T-3 lines, which means that not only can they feed servers with more bandwidth than you can, the redundancy offers great uptimes. Considering that co-los buy bandwidth in bulk, it's possible that you're spending more money feeding your servers with redundant broadband in your office than the co-lo would charge for their whole package. Note: Before going to a co-lo, you should monitor your actual bandwidth use for at least 60 days, so you'll know whether you need half a megabit, 5 megabits or 5 gigabits per month.

·                                 3. Security: Co-los have solid security schemes in place. Unless you have a secure data center (with adequate locks, heating, cooling and Halon fire prevention), your servers will be better protected in a co-lo than at your own office. Also, as part of the security, some co-los have staff available 24x7 who can physically reboot your server if you need it, or who can let you access your gear for after-hours maintenance. (Some "bargain" co-los are only staffed 8x5.)

·                                 4. Access to hardware: Co-los can offer shared access to networking hardware, potentially saving you a lot of money compared to buying your own state-of-the-art infrastructure. For example, some co-los offer access to their own high-throughput firewall appliances, backup systems, remote access services, and even anti-spam/anti-virus servers that they can put in front of your own e-mail server. If you use tape to backup your servers, many will happily change your tapes for you every day, and even arrange off-site storage for those tapes. Many co-los can also provide gigabit switch ports with Virtual LANs to tie your servers together -- and arrange for VPNs to provide secure links back to your office.

Now, not every server is a good candidate for going to a co-lo facility. You wouldn't want to put your LAN's primary file/print server there, for example. Servers that are only accessed from within your LAN environment should stay within your offices. However, a co-lo is great place to put your Web server and your e-mail/messaging server. Servers that telecommuters or remote offices access, such as SharePoint or Lotus Notes, will be faster and more robust if you house them at a co-lo.

Four Reasons Your Servers Belong In a Co-location Facility

Costs of Co-location
Prices at co-los vary, but you will probably see charges of between $100 and $150 per month for storing a single 1U or 2U server. This would include several IP addresses, electrical power, and some measured amount of bandwidth. Prices increase if you need extra IP addresses, or if you know you'll need extra bandwidth. Like cell phone plans, you typically get a certain amount of data transfer "included" in each month's rent, and then pay a steep penalty for extra usage. It pays to review your usage regularly.

If you need more space than that, many co-los will rent you a quarter rack (10U), half rack (21U) or full rack (42U) worth of space. Again, prices range tremendously, but I've seen common prices of about $300 to $400/month for a quarter rack up to about $1,000-$1,500 for a full rack.

On top of that, you can add on extra services, like firewalls, backup services, anti-spam/anti-virus filtering, managed virtual private networks, modem-based remote access, gigabit switch ports (if you don't want to provide your own switch) or off-site tape rotation.

Oh, don't forget: Rental and service costs are business expenses, rather than depreciated capital costs. This will make your accountants happy.

Questions for Co-los
Co-los make good business sense, and good technical sense, for companies that own their own servers, but don't have a full-fledged data center. However, not all co-los are created equal. Before you drive your business-critical server to a co-location facility (and I recommend that you find one nearby, say within a 30-45 minute drive if possible), here are some questions to ask:

·                     How redundant is your facility? The co-lo's managers should be willing to explain their heating, cooling and electrical system capabilities and backup systems --in writing.

·                     Where does your bandwidth come from? You should expect at least two separate Internet service providers, and ample bandwidth for all tenants. Again, ask for details. They should be happy to provide them.

·                     How secure is the facility? If they let people get to the machines without always checking photo ID and without comparing that to a tenant's access control list, run screaming.

·                     What are their prices like? It pays to shop around. The co-los in your area might have a wide range of prices and offers. As with all rents, make sure the contract spells out exactly what's included in the base rental, and what costs extra.