Editor’s notE VEtting a ColoCation PartnEr

ColoCation Vs. CloUd

Colo in tHE agE oF CloUd

Moving out: Colocation is What it’s all aboutMoving data from an on-premises data center to a colocation facility is only half the battle—choosing the provider can be quite a process in itself.

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Choosing a Provider that Won’t drive You Co-loco

The decision to use colocation is one that has been increasingly easy for IT to make. The numerous benefits—improved infrastructure capabilities, better support and security, and plenty of others—of colo facilities have led to a significant influx of data into these cen-ters. Organizations may want to keep certain workloads on-premises, but the concerns over security have been abated mostly thanks to improvements by providers.

With the colo option looking all the more attractive for businesses, the question has become which provider to choose. Simply deciding that you want to use colocation isn’t enough, as facilities will vary greatly. To assist, data center expert Clive Longbottom provides a checklist for vetting colo providers, from the

logistics of the building to the people working in it.

Next, cloud expert Jim O’Reilly hashes out the true differences between cloud and coloca-tion. He explains the distinctions between the two and how confusion can sometimes compli-cate the decision-making process.

Finally, TechTarget’s Meredith Courteman-che keeps our attention upward, as she focuses on the cloud and the potential for companies to rely on its benefits in conjunction with colo-cation. n

Patrick HammondAssociate Features Editor

Data Center & Virtualization Media GroupTechTarget

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Vetting a Colocation Partner

If you’ve decided that colocation is the right direction for your business, the next step is choosing the right partner. Given the scope of the investment and the complexity of mov-ing all that equipment, it makes sense to have a thorough vetting process in place before mak-ing a decision.

Evaluating potential colo partners is easier when you have a checklist:

n the building itself. You’ve been there, walked around and seen it in all its pristine glory. Vetting a colo provider should include fore-thought, however, as it is often easy to be distracted by the capabilities of the current facilities. Will that building be big enough to accommodate not only your growth, but that of the other clients the provider expects to have? If not, what does that mean to you? Will future growth require you to spread your platform across two facilities?

n Building security. Your equipment is your equipment. You don’t want anyone other than those who you’ve given authorization to touch it, but this is often out of your control. Thus, it’s imperative that you’re assured anyone entering the colo facility is thoroughly checked. Ask a potential provider if it logs all move-ments around the facility. Does it enforce poli-cies to stop entry by means of tailgating (one person following another through a door)? Are cages floor-to-ceiling?

Don’t forget the outside of the building. Is it protected from ram raiding? Are there windows in the data center itself or just the corridors?

n information security. You need to see whether the provider has accreditations such as ISO 27001. Look at how the provider manages its own data. You need to be thorough and ask to see its processes with regard to customer information and the vetting process for the

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employees who will be dealing directly with your assets.

n Power provisioning. Equipment densities are increasing rapidly at data centers. A facility may need to double the amount of kilowatts it can provide in the next five years. Will the provider have the capacity to do this? If not, what plans does it have to accommodate the potential increase in demand? Backup power is another consideration, and you need to get the specs from the provider. Does it have a modular approach so that new auxiliary generators can be added or replaced as needed? Power failure is a looming possibility for any provider, so you should check how often it runs full tests of failover plans.

n Cooling. Where possible, you want a pro-vider that uses low-energy cooling. Although energy prices are relatively stable, costs ebb and flow—sometimes without warning. Thus, free air, adiabatic or other low-energy approaches will be better long-term bets than the use of computer room air conditioning (CRAC) systems.

n Environmental monitoring. The majority of colocation providers offer fire monitoring, which will trigger a gas-based suppression sys-tem. However, a better option would be those that offer a full early-warning system. These rely on infrared sensors that identify emerg-ing hot spots in equipment, smoke-detection (VESDA) systems, moisture monitoring and tremble monitoring alongside fire monitor-ing. This type of setup allows the provider to actively take steps to identify a problem before it affects the performance of the facility, or, even worse, forces a complete shutdown.

n dCiM monitoring. Data center infrastructure monitoring (DCIM) has grown in popularity in recent years. Within a colocation facility, you may install your own systems manage-ment tools that monitor and manage what your equipment is doing. However, you have little to no visibility as to what is happening around you. Aptly named “noisy neighbors” may be hurting network performance, and high-den-sity systems could be causing power problems in your sector of the facility. Colocation pro-viders that have good DCIM capabilities can act

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as overseers of the total environment, keeping an eye on the overall performance of the facility and advising where necessary as to how to bet-ter implement and run equipment.

n network access. Ensure that the facility is served by multiple network providers, and that those networks terminate at different parts of the facility. This is important because you don’t want 10 different providers coming through the same underground pipe that’s just been struck by a backhoe.

n resiliency. As well as all the requirements around power backup, look at what a colocation provider can offer in platform resiliency. Can it operate across more than one facility? This is beneficial, as it allows you to mirror your sys-tems and subsequently fail over without the need for the high impact of moving toward a disaster recovery plan.

n overall fit. Although this is the last item on the checklist, it is a critically important one. You may have been able to tick all the other requirements, but if you don’t get along with the people you have to interact with at the facility, then you will never be happy. Check that account management is always available, so that you go directly to them rather than having to continually wade through first- and second-line support when you know you need third-line support. Talk to staff—see how happy they are and how long they have been with the provider.

Making the decision to move to a colo- cation facility is becoming easier. Choosing the right one is where the difficulty lies. With this checklist you should be able to make a selection that meets your needs and that you won’t later regret. —Clive Longbottom

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Colocation vs. Cloud: Can Your it team tell them apart

As cloud computing evolves, its defini-tion seems to grow and encompass a number of things. And while public cloud, private cloud and hybrid cloud are all logical extensions of the basic cloud computing idea, other “cloudy” variants are questionable.

For example, colocation—a predecessor to public cloud—is often confused with cloud. In a colocation model, a user places systems and storage in a third-party data center to take advantage of networking or a better location. The main distinction between colocation vs. cloud lies in the way organizations use servers. And while servers are virtualized in both public cloud and colocation, the two are worlds apart.

With cloud, a powerful orchestration suite controls the birth and death of instances. This capability is really what distinguishes cloud from other technologies. Colocation usually involves fixed-term contracts and often offers little flexibility, while the cloud offers

compute power on demand.Clouds are typically built on commercial,

off-the-shelf x86-based systems, a setup that helps to minimize costs and enable rapid tech-nology advancements. To transform IT opera-tions, cloud’s agility is key. It allows more to be done when necessary, and minimizes costs when loading is down. The cloud also provides instances, such as those for big data, which are unavailable in most colocation equipment because of their infrequent use.

Colocation isn’t as passé as you might think. In fact, for stable or long-term use cases, such as Web-serving or media streaming, it might be a better choice than cloud.

Additionally, colocation helps resolve one of the biggest challenges associated with hybrid cloud: moving data between private and public clouds over a low-bandwidth WAN. To over-come this time-consuming obstacle, users can place shared storage in a colocation facility

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to take advantage of faster links to the public cloud. If the facility has dedicated fiber, the results are even better.

Colocation, in this context, is topologically different than using server farms to buffer con-tent—a formerly commonplace model. How-ever, colocation still relies on a host to house and network the gear. As this idea evolves, expect storage rental deals from colocation providers. But because they’ll offer fixed, dedi-cated storage through long-term agreements,

these will differ from public cloud storage.As the cloud becomes the mainstream com-

puting vehicle, expect further evolution of the colocation concept. Almost certainly, the next move will involve colocation within the large cloud service providers’ operations. This might come in the form of a dedicated—or rented—server pool, or even garage space for a tenant’s own containerized data center.

Generally, vendors distinguish between cloud and colocation services, using differ-ent language to describe each. With cloud, for instance, server shares are called instances. But there are some grey areas. For example, there may be an orchestration suite handling coloca-tion gear, but the intent is usually to migrate users onto a denser platform rather than an agile environment; contracts will reflect this. —Jim O’Reilly

as the cloud continues to gain traction as the main- stream com puting vehicle, expect further evolution of the colocation concept.

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Colo in the age of Cloud

If you’re like most traditional IT organiza-tions, you have a disaster recovery site residing in a colocation center 20 miles from your main data center. And if you’re like most startups, your servers spin up and down on a public cloud running unknown hardware.

Today, with startups outgrowing their clouds and legacy data centers aging out of usefulness, colocation and dedicated hosting serve as tran-sitional spaces for production workloads, with a range of services to support customers.

Conventional organizations build or upgrade on-premises data centers because it’s what they’ve always done, said Josh Hatten, consult-ing manager of a data center relocation con-sulting business within Eden Prairie, Minn.’s DataLink. But this conventional approach doesn’t always make sense in terms of cost, uptime or performance, he said. Hatten’s seen a general trend toward colocation in the years since the recession hit, and IT organizations are

increasingly adopting managed services such as infrastructure monitoring and management.

tHE Colo CoMProMisE

CenturyLink, QTS and similar providers blur the lines between colo, managed services and cloud. IT can customize a suite of cloud ser-vices—backup as a service, disaster recovery as a service, low-latency hybrid cloud intercon-nects—and colocation space, while tacking on extras such as IT asset lifecycle management. This accommodates existing capital invest-ments and workloads that require direct busi-ness ownership and control.

“The whole is bigger than the sum of its parts,” said Patrick Gilmore, CTO of cloud and colocation provider The Markley Group in Boston, which recently added application and server monitoring to its portfolio of services. “You need to adapt to the way companies do

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things,” he said. Over the past 20 years, an IT department at a financial, insurance and retail company evolved its backend infrastructure to fit its specific needs. “They’re not going to change their entire system to save a bit of money.”

California-based music streaming service Cloud Cover Music represents the other side of the equation: a move off public cloud. Managed services on dedicated hardware from Tualatin, Ore.’s Peak Hosting offered the right balance between owning a data center and pure cloud.

“I get immediate monitoring at machine lev-els, as if I was in the data center myself,” said John Shiple, CTO of Cloud Cover Music. It’s cost effective because he doesn’t have to pay for a sys admin to do the monitoring required on Amazon Web Services instances.

The combination of application and server-level monitoring services on dedicated

hardware enabled Cloud Cover Music to opti-mize the code and catch problems before cus-tomers felt the effects, he said. This connects developers with operations—without having to restructure into a DevOps IT shop.

“We used ... a number of [cloud] compa-nies on the server side [before transitioning to dedicated hardware hosting],” said Carrie Pobre, business development director at Cloud Cover Music. “Peak was a company that could pro-vide that back-end service and structuring to allow us to scale,” including a move into more advanced business analytics products.

By using selective outsourcing to handle rou-tine IT tasks, the organization relies on highly technical IT staff at any time of day, but only when needed.

“You don’t want to hire someone to set up an OS, do security patches, etc. These aren’t part of your core business,” said Markley’s Gilmore.

‘BUY tHE BasE’ BUnK?

Many colocation providers rely on lessees to adopt their cloud and managed services offer-ings. White space in colocation facilities has

Many colocation providers rely on lessees to adopt their cloud and managed services offer ings.

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become increasingly commoditized, as a cabi-net costs $600 to $700 per month in some facilities, Hatten said. Five years ago, Tech-Target research valued whole colocation racks at $700 to $4,000 per month, depending on density.

If you don’t have an existing million-dollar server investment to depreciate, however, don’t assume that a move into colo space is cheaper than hosted servers.

The adage of ‘buy the base, rent the spikes’ doesn’t always work, Markley’s Gilmore said. “There’s an assumption that 24/7 servers are cheaper to own than rent,” he said, and that’s only true for the companies with massive buying power, such as Web-scale IT names. Over the past five to 10 years, cloud prices from AWS, Google Cloud Platform and other

providers have dropped enough to make enter-prises question buying the base, he said.

Understanding the base is also important. IT organizations must frame cost and return on investment discussions about cloud and colo-cation within an overarching data center strat-egy that delineates uptime and performance expectations for different workloads, Datalink’s Hatten said. Otherwise, sprawl and inefficien-cies will persist.

Know what you need for steady operation, and how much it will cost, Coughlin said. Low prices typify standard AWS or Google instances, but when you tweak and customize deployments, “the costs on a public cloud will go through the roof,” he said. Coughlin noted that a company in the gaming industry cut $5 million in annual costs by leaving AWS to man-age its own high-density hardware in the colo.

solVing For sKills, not sPaCE

Bidco, a Kenya-based retailer with locations in 15 countries on the African continent, out-sourced its IT infrastructure management to IBM, but remained in its existing data center.

if you don’t have an existing million-dollar server investment to depreciate, don’t assume that a move into colo space is cheaper than hosted servers.

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Centralized back-end IT is an enabler for the business to continue expanding across Africa, said company CIO Alkane Patel, but it’s not Bidco’s core business. When it came time for a server refresh initiative, Bidco decided man-aged services from IBM would yield the best results.

“Rather than finding a problem and pulling in partners to fix it, now we have proactive mea-sures before a failure, with continuous updates

and patches,” Patel said.While Bidco would like to use some cloud

services, the bandwidth isn’t good enough yet to support it.

“Within the next five to seven years, connec-tivity and support for cloud services in Kenya will pick up,” Patel said. “Managed services are a good step, but [it would be simpler to] plug-and-play to the Internet and start using a good platform.” —Meredith Courtemanche

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AboUt tHe

AUtHors

MErEditH CoUrtEManCHE is the site editor for SearchDataCenter and has covered semiconductor and IT topics since 2006. You can reach her on Twitter: @DataCenterTT.

CliVE longBottoM is the co-founder and service direc-tor of IT research and analysis firm Quocirca, based in the U.K. Longbottom has more than 15 years of experience in the field. With a background in chemical engineering, he’s worked on automation, control of hazardous sub-stances, document management and knowledge manage-ment projects.

JiM o’rEillY was vice president of engineering at Germane Systems, where he created ruggedized servers and stor-age for the U.S. submarine fleet. He has also held senior management positions at SGI/Rackable and Verari; was CEO at startups Scalant and CDS; headed operations at PC Brand and Metalithic; and led major divisions of Me-morex-Telex and NCR, where his team developed the first SCSI ASIC, now in the Smithsonian. Jim is currently a consultant focused on storage and cloud computing.

Moving Out: Colocation Is What It’s All About is a SearchDataCenter.com e-publication.

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