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The interview below was with one of the data center guys I’ve worked with in the past. I thought we could discuss his views on co-location – one of the bus words when it comes to finding a new data center.

So tell me about Co-location

Co-location is a very grand way of saying you’re renting data center space, in effect you agree with a data center company that you will take say 300 square feet of data center space in their facility. They then partition it off, agree access terms with you, procedures etc, and you install your kit, arrange the network connection and connect it to your infrastructure.

Can you give an example where you’ve used co-location

Well many of the big banks use it for bcp – business continuity planning, as in their backup site. Lets say that the power in your main data center has failed, well business should continue in your backup site, for that reason it’s often located elsewhere and because it’s an expensive exercise, co-locating it makes sense. I’ll buy a few rooms with desks and pcs, and a data center for my servers/networks.

What are the benefits?

Time, money, hassle, building/scoping a data center is a large piece of work, you can’t easily forecast server growth, power requirements, cooling requirements etc.

The disadvantages

Well their mainly internal, the co-locating firms tend to be risk averse and good at what they do, they don’t want to upset any of their clients, so you don’t have to worry in that respect. Internally, there are the debates about security/risk management/procedures – you’re sharing data/potential market information in another location.

On a day to day basis the main thing to be aware off is the risk averse angle. We’ll run our data centers at say 90/95% or so capacity, in order to provide the maximum capacity/benefit to the business with the minimum amount of risk (we know our own data center and what we can get away with). A third party wont let you behave like that in your co-location site particularly if it might affect another company next door.

Do you see a growth in co-location?

It’s already happening because of blades. Many of the large investment banks have been having problems hosting their blades, these blades are typically calculation engines, just giant calculators, giving them to someone else to host makes good sense.

You need another 1500 blades for application batch3, you order them, request more space, plug them in and move on.

Next.

Wikipedia has an article about co-location, check it out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-location

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