The colocation data center market saw huge growth during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, reaching a value of $76.8 billion in 2023 and showing no signs of slowing down. Companies continue to move away from on-premises deployment strategies due to the expense and hassle of maintaining a data center, or to improve their resilience in the face of increasing cyberattacks and natural disasters. This blog discusses the benefits of adopting a colocation strategy and describes the best practices for optimizing colocation data center resilience.
What is a colocation data center?
Colocation is the process of deploying and hosting your servers and other equipment in a third-party data center, known as a colocation data center. This allows you to use someone else’s high-tech facilities and infrastructure instead of building out everything in your own (on-premises) space. It’s called colocation because you co-locate your equipment there – you’re renting cabinet space in a shared facility with other customers instead of using your own dedicated space. That means you still get to use your own servers, storage devices, and other hardware, but you can rely on the colocation facility to provide redundant power, climate control, physical security, and network infrastructure.
What are the benefits of colocation?
Colocation offers several advantages over on-premises deployments, including:
Cost
In terms of up-front costs, spinning up a new colocation deployment is less expensive than deploying a new on-premises data center. While you still have to purchase and install your own in-rack tech stack, as well as pay for monthly rental fees, power, and internet, the colocation provider handles the setup and maintenance of the facility itself. That means you won’t have to worry about things like HVAC and physical security yourself, helping to reduce both upfront and recurring costs.
Compliance
With on-premises infrastructure, your organization is 100% responsible for data protection and compliance. Colocation providers have a shared responsibility approach, meaning they are partially liable for certain services while you’re only responsible for the remainder. While this helps reduce complexity on your end, it can also increase compliance risk. You might adhere to all necessary rules and regulations on your end, but the third-party colocation facility might not. If that happens, you’re ultimately responsible for any issues discovered during an audit, regardless of the offense’s source. That said, there are compliant colocation data centers that are certified as meeting strict, specific regulatory requirements, which is recommended for organizations in highly regulated industries like defense and healthcare.
Geographic distribution
Colocation data centers make it easier to extend your geographic reach by reducing the cost and work involved in spinning up new locations. Rather than building out an entirely new facility every time you want to expand, you simply rent space in an existing data center in your chosen region. This allows you to, for example, improve the performance of your services in a particular area to meet increasing customer demand, or deploy artificial intelligence solutions closer to branch offices and remote manufacturing sites.
Scalability
Scaling an on-premises data center is time-consuming and expensive because you may need to build out additional racks, install more HVAC, and increase your power draw, among other concerns. By comparison, colocation facilities typically handle much of the work involved in scaling their infrastructure, so all you need to do is install your hardware in the rack. Scaling a colocation deployment is faster and more cost-effective than on-premises, enabling you to meet surging demand without busting your budget.
Resilience
The scalability and geographic distribution of colocation data center deployments can ultimately improve network resilience, or the ability to keep delivering digital services during adverse events like natural disasters or ransomware attacks. It’s easier to deploy redundant services and backup solutions in multiple regions as well as build-out a resilience system with alternative infrastructure that can take over when primary systems fail. A colocation strategy can help you minimize downtime and meet stringent SLA requirements with less expense and hassle than on-premises deployments.
Best practices for colocation data center resilience
Colocation deployments lend themselves to greater resilience by virtue of their potential geographic distribution and scalability, but there are steps you can take to shore up your resilience even more. These include:
Automation
Infrastructure automation solutions like zero-touch provisioning (ZTP) make it easier to spin-up new servers and hardware to replace those that fail or are compromised in a ransomware attack. Automated configuration management solutions like Red Hat Ansible help prevent unauthorized changes or botched updates from compromising critical systems.
AIOps
Artificial intelligence for IT operations, or AIOps, uses advanced machine learning algorithms to monitor and protect data center infrastructure. AIOps solutions help detect potential maintenance issues before they cause failures, automatically generate and triage incidents, and identify threats with far greater accuracy than traditional firewalls.
Environmental monitoring
Colocation providers are responsible for maintaining optimal conditions in the data center, but sometimes HVAC systems malfunction or a natural disaster occurs to throw things out of balance. Environmental monitoring systems use sensors deployed around the rack to collect data on temperature, humidity, airflow, and more, giving remote IT teams a virtual presence in the colocation facility. This allows them to respond to changing conditions much faster, potentially avoiding equipment failures or long-term maintenance issues.
Out-of-band management (OOBM)
Out-of-band management (OOBM) involves separating the control plane for data center infrastructure and making it accessible on an alternative network. The OOBM network doesn’t rely on any production infrastructure, meaning it’ll stay accessible even if there’s a critical failure or ransomware attack. OOBM console servers (a.k.a., serial consoles) provide a convenient, centralized management platform for the control plane while keeping infrastructure management interfaces completely isolated from the production network, further enhancing colocation resilience.
Optimize your colocation data center with Nodegrid
Nodegrid OOBM serial consoles provide a vendor-neutral control plane for colocation data center infrastructure. Nodegrid can extend ZTP to other vendors’ devices as well as host third-party automation, security, and AIOps solutions. It supports a wide range of USB environmental sensors as well as legacy and mixed-vendor infrastructure devices.
Schedule a free demo to see Nodegrid colocation data center solutions in action.