Colocation. What it is and example use cases

A variety of customers, a variety of use cases

At Datanet we have a variety of customers who use CoLocation services to their advantage in many different ways. 

CoLocation is all about housing your critical IT equipment in a resilient data centre with diverse power, cooling and connectivity together with knowledgeable, helpful staff on hand.

In this post we take a look at some of the uses of CoLocation implemented by several of our customers, along with case studies, to highlight a few of the many positive advantages of offsite CoLocation.

Colocation to provide managed IT services

The most common use and example of CoLocation is that of the customer providing managed I.T. services who requires as little as 1U or more often a ⅓ rack (one-third rack of 14U) or all the way up to their own 47U full rack. They take CoLocation to house their IT hardware with which they provide their customers or staff with a resilient and secure suite of IT services which they deliver from Datanet’s data centre. Datanet’s tier3+ data centre, with multiple onsite generators, UPS systems, cooling systems and resilient Internet connection, guarantees 99.999% uptime and they rely on this guarantee to give their customers or end users an always-on service and availability of their applications and services at all times.

Datanet and Managed IT Services – Case Study.

Colocation to provide hosting for legacy hardware

There are many examples of hardware and applications that just don’t transition to or lend themselves to Public Cloud services. Graphics rendering, high performance computing (HPC) and HyperConverged Infrastructure (HCI) computing are just a few of the many examples. Here the customer or end user needs unusually high compute or storage or power requirements or the application just simply needs to live on dedicated hardware that just isn’t suitable for Public Cloud.

Datanet and hosting for legacy hardware – Case Study.

Colocation as part of your business continuity plan

One of our customers, operating from central London, uses our CoLocation as part of their business continuity plan which requires them to house their critical DR servers in a secure offsite location outside of London. The offsite hardware needs to be close enough for them to get to quickly if needs be and Datanet’s London Edge data centre is ideally situated to this end. They also backup all their data to Datanet’s Dell EqualLogic  storage arrays and in the event of a loss of infrastructure in London they can come to the Datanet offices to restore all their valuable data onto the hardware which is housed in a rack in the data centre i.e. CoLocation. The added advantage that Datanet has is that we also offer customer suites that are available to our customers.

Datanet and business continuity plans – Case Study.

Colocation as a proof of concept (POC) laboratory

Another of our business customers takes a significant amount of rack space to provide their Proof of Concept (PoC) laboratory services. They perform testing of various applications and hardware for their large International Telecommunications customers before releasing it into a live environment. CoLocation within our Data Centre allows them to simulate a global live environment on which they can fully test these applications, software and hardware ensuring that they are delivering a finished product that will work as expected when rolled out into the real world.

So, as you can see, just from looking at a few examples of our CoLocation customers we have highlighted a variety of uses for CoLocation which can benefit businesses and give you a choice, you don’t have to go to the big Public Cloud providers.

Whether it is used as part of your Business Continuity Plan, to offer managed I.T. services from the cloud for your own customers or to set up a proof of concept lab to perform testing, CoLocation is a fundamental building block for these and many more business propositions.

Datanet CoLocation not only offers space, power, cooling, connectivity and security but also availability of your data and services and high bandwidth but we are very flexible and accommodating.  You also have the peace of mind that on-site expert engineers are available when you need them.

Datanet and proof of concept (POC) laboratory – Case Study.