As the demands on IT increase, managing the expertise and resources required to support the entire IT delivery stack is becoming more difficult and more expensive for many mid-size firms. Many firms are finding that colocation offers an attractive alternative – outsourcing the data center infrastructure to experts that can provide higher levels of uptime at the same time keeping the mission critical knowledge of their data and business applications inside the company.

Colocation is a cap-ex free (no capital expense required) alternative to maintaining your own data center. Rather than invest the capital in backup generators, UPS and HVAC units, and network and the operating expense in trained data center expertise, colocation lets you leverage a multi-tenant data center that has already made the investment in the infrastructure and personnel.

By colocating in multi-tenant data centers, firms can take advantage of very high levels of expertise and uptime at a fraction of the cost of running their own data center. The multi-tenant data center effectively shares the infrastructure, operating costs, and access to experienced data center staff across a number of companies.

We've just added a new Rack&Stack Service for our colocation clients.  We've had an unbelievable number of clients ask for a way to help them offload and simplify their colocation move-in, so this new offering is in direct response to those customer requests.

Online Tech’s Colocation Rack&Stack™ is our turnkey colocation rack design and build service that eliminates the hassle of installing your servers at the data center.  We'll design your rack layout, uncrate your servers, install them in your colocation rack, and wire everything to your specification. Our Colocation Rack&Stack Service is a hassle-free way to deploy your colocation without ever needing to visit our data center.

Check out the before & after shots:

Imagine Trying to trace a faulty cable in this layout!

Online Tech's Colocation Stack&Rack Service - Easy to Manage & Maintain

Learn more on our web page for Colocation Rack and Stack.

Our ready-to-go, weatherized satellite dish, combined with high speed Internet bandwidth and colocation or dedicated server hosting provides a great set of options for satellite data and video intensive applications.

Ideal for a broad range of commercial and research applications ranging from satellite video capture to getting real time feeds for communications, NASA data, and weather data.  The satellite dish receives C and Ku band signals.

You can go here for more information on our colocation satellite dish.

Selecting a co-location provider is an important decision. Some co-location providers are willing to submit to independent audits and then fund the equipment and process investments necessary to complete the full audit. Online Tech recently completed our own SAS-70 audit at all three Michigan data centers because we know this process offers our clients the following benefits:

1) Cost

If you’re thinking of building out your own data center, don’t forget to budget SAS-70 auditing costs. They can easily run over $100,000 per year. Or, when you outsource your data center, selecting a vendor who has already made the SAS-70 investments saves you on investing in these same costs and other security costs. For example, by sharing a copy of the SAS-70 report from your co-location provider to your PCI or CISP provider you can often reduce the costs for those audits.

Visiting data centers of prospective co-location providers is an important part of the selection process. But visits are expensive. They take time and expertise. The visits themselves take time. Then there’s the time to debrief - So, Jenny, what did you think of that data center?” By reviewing a SAS-70 audit report you can learn immediately what controls are in place and if the data center has been reviewed for completeness and audited by a CPA expert.

2) Security

Co-location providers all claim to be secure. But a provider who voluntarily goes through a SAS-70 audit is paying more than lip service. They have hired a third party auditor to test and confirm the controls that underlie the ability to truly deliver a secure environment.

While you can do your own visits to make sure a datacenter is secure, and your own network review to make sure a network is secure, it’s much more difficult to confirm the riskiest portion of data center operations – the processes.

Some of the world’s best hackers have relied on “social engineering” to gain access. See www.kevinmitnick.com for one of the most famous cases which served as the inspiration for the movie War Games. Social engineering is the process of tricking people to divulge passwords and other critical information. How do you know that your provider is only making changes to your equipment as directed by you? How do you know someone else isn’t calling your provider and posing as one of your employees? What processes or procedures does your provider have to assure this doesn’t happen? In a SAS-70 audit they will actually test the controls you claim, so you don’t have to worry.

3) Reliability

Today’s 7x24 always-on hosted world requires some of the highest reliabilities the industry has had to deliver. Leading the charge is redundancy – of everything. Redundancy of power, network, servers, storage and even entire data centers make up the bulk of the investment towards every higher degrees of reliability. A SAS-70 audit ensures that claims of backup systems including generator for power, additional cooling units and UPS (Universal Power Supply) infrastructure are in place and properly managed.

Hardware failure can often be attributed lack of preventative maintenance of critical infrastructure components and other “pre-failure investments”. The SAS-70 audit assures that any claim of preventative maintenance is backed up with proper documentation and service records.

But, like security, many service interruptions happen due to human error. Changes made to the wrong device, changes improperly engineered or improperly managed are all very common root causes of failure. At the heart of a great data center operation is strict management of all changes –called change management. The SAS70 audit will assure you any claims regarding change management exist and are followed. The result is higher reliability.

4) Competition

SAS-70 has become a well known and respected standard for data centers. Claiming you use only SAS-70 audited providers is a strategic advantage.

By selecting a SAS-70 provider, you show your prospects and clients that you take security seriously. To be competitive with any hosted application (e.g. SAAS), you will have to host your information in a SAS-70 audited environment.

Besides, let’s say you are a fast growing SaaS provider with 30 customers. Currently none of your customers require you to locate in a SAS-70 audited data center. Then you have an opportunity to land that really large corporate customer but they require a SAS-70 environment. What do you do now? Are you going to have two providers? Are you going to move your other 30 customers? If you anticipate growth, and you want to compete, you’ll have to choose a SAS-70 audited provider.

5) Regulation

A SAS-70 data center may be required for you to win clients in certain regulated industries. Certain types of data, by regulation, require that physical, logical and process controls be in place. Specifically, Section 404 of Sarbanes-Oxley, calls for testing of internal IT controls that relate to financial reporting, even for outsourced IT functions. HIPAA also has specific data handling controls that can be confirmed with a SAS-70 audit report. PCI and CISP compliance can be more easily accomplished by starting with a SAS-70 audit.

The same principle mentioned above that applied to competition applies to regulation. Say you have a wonderful online database used by many industries hosted at a data center that is not SAS-70 audited. Then you land a really large opportunity with a hospital but they require that you have a SAS-70 audited provider. What do you do? Do you move all your other customers? That’s expensive. Do you pay for the audit? That’s really expensive. Do you support two infrastructures and two providers? That’s really, really expensive. Start with a SAS-70 audited provider even if today you aren’t sure you need it.

STAMFORD, Conn., November 29, 2006 — Organizations are increasingly deploying more computing power, but, by 2008, 50 percent of current data centers will have insufficient power and cooling capacity to meet the demands of high-density equipment, according to Gartner, Inc.

Two years ago, Gartner made the above shocking prediction … then it turned out to be true. CIOs and IT Managers are maxing out their data centers as Moore’s law plays out – twice as fast, twice as much power, half the space, every 18 months.

In today’s economy, IT executives are left with a difficult set of decisions:

• Can I reduce costs to meets the demands?

• How do I keep my data center running with less skilled IT professionals on staff?

With limited capital to invest in data centers and the pressure to reduce costs, Many CIOs are considering how they can expand their data centers through co-location with an experienced managed datacenter operator.

A recent Gartner survey found that 42% of companies with a thousand employees or less had either fully or partially outsourced their data centers, while 28% are planning to do so within the next 12 months.

According to Kurt Potter, Research Director at Gartner, Inc, there are two reasons to consider outsourcing a data center: You either don't have and/or can't afford the skills to deliver the services your business needs to function or your internal IT operations are not cost-competitive.

But a data center outsourcing survey by Enterprise Systems (esj.com) and SOURCINGmag.com found the answers to why companies choose to outsource their data centers are more complex. What follows is the top 7 reasons companies choose to outsource their data center functions:

1) Reduce or Control Costs. The primary reason (44% of respondents) to outsource data center functions  is probably no surprise: to reduce or control costs. Co-location and dedicated server hosting are “Cap-Ex” free alternatives  that can eliminate large-scale data center investments.  Colocation enables CIOs to expand their data center footprint only on an as-needed basis rather than invest in an entire expansion up front.

2) Gain Access to Outside IT Resources. The second most compelling reason companies are outsourcing their data centers is the ability to leverage the people, processes and equipment that aren’t available internally.  CIOs can get access to very experienced data center staff that are shared across a “multi-tenant” data center environment without needing to hire their own full time experts in networking, security, cooling, power and data center services.

3) Free Up Internal Resources. Over three out of 10 respondents said they outsource their data center functions to free internal resources. By reducing the day-to-day maintenance chores, the in house IT team can concentrate on core applications and deliverables and leave the day-to-day data center operations to the colocation or dedicated server hosting operator.

4) Improve Customer Focus.  Another 3 out of 10 respondents outsourced data center functions to improve business or customer focus. It can be hard to keep in house staff motivated to service other departments.  With competing requirements and many demands, responsiveness can be impacted. Outsourced data center operators are in the service business.  They keep their customers by being responsive and accurate, and realize that poor service can hinder their business and profitability.

5. Accelerate Company Transformation is a reason for outsourcing any number of functions. Outsourcing non-critical functions can help keep the organization focused on critical roles during time of transformation

6. Accelerate Data Center Projects. According to an article in SearchCIO, once you determine how serious or urgent your data center problems are, quick fixes in critical areas like uptime, availability and cost efficiencies can be achieved within months via outsourcing versus an internal build out that can take years.

7. Access Outside Management Expertise. The ability to leverage management expertise not available internally rounds out the top 7 reasons companies outsource their data centers. Managed data center management teams are focused day-in and day-out on delivering data center capabilities to their clients efficiently and with a high level of service. By managing multiple large data centers, they can apply industry best practices that are difficult or expensive for individual companies to apply to their own internal data centers.

Finally, with all of the talk and news about offshore outsourcing, you may be surprised to learn that fully 80% of the survey respondents outsourced their data centers to service providers located in the United States. Most companies prefer to keeping the business domestic, in many cases in the same time zone and in close proximity to their core business.

According to the article in eWeek, IT co-location, dedicated server and web hosting businesses are expected to thrive in 2009 as IT departments are looking for ways to cut their data center budgets.   They are looking at co-location as a way top avoid capital expenses and outsource some of their operating costs.

IT co-location is the provision of space, bandwidth, and power in a data center, with the customer being required to provide and manage the computing hardware. Data centers that provide this service are called co-location centers; most are independently owned and operated.

According to the article, most analysts and industry insiders believe that the co-location and Web hosting businesses will thrive in 2009, despite the weakening economy. This is because as companies look to economize in their IT budgets, they are beginning to look more closely at hosted services as a way to avoid capital expenditures that include new servers, switches, software, and affiliated licenses and services.