Cloud Connection Centers Go Beyond Colocation

Companies considering a relocation of their IT assets from local data centers to colocation facilities have a new option to consider. It’s the Telx Cloud Connection Centers. Let’s have a look at what you can get in a cloud connection center that is above and beyond traditional colocation or carrier hotel services.

Traditional colocation offers cost savings and service enhancements based on economy of scale. The idea is that one larger environmentally controlled, highly secure and well connected data center is more efficient than hundreds or thousands of stand alone private data centers that have to meet the same requirements. This certainly makes sense. A server in your rack may be the same as the server in the colo rack, except they host hundreds or thousands of them. The backup generators at the colocation center aren’t hundreds or thousands of times larger or more expensive than the one you have in its own building out back. Nor is the fire suppression equipment, HVAC, or 24/7 staffing.

The other advantage that you find in colocation centers is connectivity. There is no way that multiple carriers are going to move into your company just to give you the option of connecting with them. They do just that at the colo. Carriers love to set up shop in colocation centers because they know that there are plenty of potential customers needing high bandwidth WAN connections. Once established, all that is needed is a simple cross connect to connect users and carriers.

In itself, this is a good reason for you to move to a colocation center. Even if you are perfectly happy with your infrastructure and technical staffing costs, how easy is it to get bandwidth? Well located business have many options to choose from. Companies that have built off the beaten path may find that fiber optic services are hard to come by or very expensive to bring in. There’s a strategic advantage in moving your high performance servers and bandwidth demanding public facing applications to a colocation facility. You can then use more modest bandwidth to communicate with your server farm.

Telx takes this to the next level with their Cloud Connection Centers. Telx is a major player in colocation services and carrier connectivity. This year, they’ve started offering a new service called cloudXchange that is a global community of providers and users of cloud services. Members colocate within the Telx facilities. Telx provides the cross connects and other interconnections to link users and providers.

Isn’t the whole idea of the cloud that it is “somewhere, out there” and you save money by buying cloud services on pay as you go basis instead of managing your own equipment? For smaller companies, especially those who don’t want to deal with technicalities, that’s a model that works. Larger organizations have found problems with this simplistic model. A big problem is latency and bandwidth in connection to the cloud. Other issues include the need for private as well as public clouds to ensure security and performance while reducing costs.

The whole movement to the cloud has become so important that Telx has rebranded their 15 colocation and connection centers as Cloud Connection Centers. Within those centers, you have easy access to cloud computing, storage and Software as a Service (SaaS) resources. You have an almost infinite array of options from running your own equipment to completely outsourcing to cloud vendors and any mix in-between.

How strong is this trend to everything in the cloud? Strong enough that Telx is breaking ground on a brand new 215,000 square foot data center in Clifton, N.J. to complement their existing Clifton facility and their New York City center at 60 Hudson St. A private fiber ring will connect 60 Hudson and Clifton to minimize latency.

Are you in the midst of doing private vs public vs hybrid cloud tradeoffs against traditional colocation and operating your own private data center? This would be a good time to explore additional options offered at a Cloud Connection Center to complete your cost/benefit analysis.

Managed Hosting in Clouds and Colos

When it comes to hosting, you have all sorts of options. Most individuals and smaller companies opt for shared hosting. It provides decent performance at a rock bottom price. Once you get too big for shared Web hosting, you’ve got a decision to make. Do you do it yourself or opt for a managed solution?

There was a time when you needed the savvy to run your own web server to even get a site up and running. Now that Linux and Windows hosting has become so common and standardized, there are lots of places to get hosted. Even larger companies that insisted on maintaining control by buying their own servers and rack mounting them in their own temperature controlled data centers are taking a second look at colocation and clouds. Why? It’s mostly about cost but also about resources.

One of the big resource bottlenecks today is bandwidth. Certainly, carriers have kept up with offerings at GigE, 10 GigE, OC-768, wavelengths and dark fiber. What they haven’t done is provide universal access. While competitive fiber optic networks are expanding their service footprints every day, the majority of business locations still aren’t lit and aren’t likely to be in the near future. Ethernet over Copper bridges the gap for some. Speeds are up to 200 Mbps now. EoC is distance limited, however, so that your best chance for service is in a downtown business district.

Move to a colocation facility or cloud service, however, and your bandwidth issues may be over. They may not be if you need a high bandwidth pipe between your facility and the cloud. But if most of your bandwidth demand is coming from Internet users rather than in-house users, colos and clouds look pretty attractive. Cloud providers locate with the same facility at major carriers to ensure themselves of almost unlimited bandwidth. You can do the same thing by packing up your high bandwidth demand servers and shipping them to a colo facility. The best deals are where multiple carriers have established points of presence and are willing to bid for your business.

Another attraction of colocation is jettisoning the capital investment and operating costs associated with running your own data center. The colo has high security, backup power, environmental control and a tech support staff available 24/7. You need to provide the same things. Economy of scale favors the colocation company with its much larger facility and lots of customers to amortize the cost.

Smaller companies may find that they can’t afford an around the clock tech staff nor the investment required to build or expand an in-house data center. A move to a nearby colo center can get them the facilities they need for a monthly fee. But why stop there? Perhaps it makes even more economic sense to forget about having your own hardware at all. Why not pay as you go on everything?

This is the appeal of everything-as-a-service. Hedge your bets by renting rather than buying. You can do that at many colocation centers now. They’ll put a server in the rack for you and keep it maintained. It’s just like having your own hardware except that when you don’t need it anymore, you just walk away. Need a bigger server? Don’t buy one. Simply upgrade your colo service.

The cloud does the colo one better. The cloud philosophy is “why commit to any particular hardware at all?” Why, indeed? In the cloud all services are virtualized. You don’t need to know or care what they’ve mounted in the racks. What you are concerned about is how many instances of virtualized servers you need at the moment. If you find that your demands fluctuate, you can increase or decrease the number of servers or amount of storage almost instantly. The well of resources to tap is nearly unlimited.

The problem now is how to sort out the options. Shared hosting is nearly a commodity these days. Get competitive quotes for colocation and cloud hosting services for your IT operations and then compare with what it costs you to provide the same value in-house.

The Rush To Cloud Service Data Centers

There’s a major migration afoot. It’s a move, almost a stampede, from in-house server rooms to public data centers worldwide. Let’s take a look at what this trend is all about and where it may be leading.

The original reason for companies to consider data center colocation was cost savings. The tradeoff is fairly simple. Instead of your organization building and operating its own data center, you ship your servers, switches, routers and network appliances off to a colo facility. That facility offers cost savings through economy of scale. Instead of each business having to come up with environmentally controlled real estate, fire suppression, backup generator power and high bandwidth connectivity, the larger colocation company provides these facilities for hundreds or thousands of customers.

A colo or “carrier hotel”, as they were originally called when the main customers were competitive local exchange carriers, can provide the 24/7 technical staffing that you may not be able to afford. They’ve expanded their suite of services to rent not just rack and cage space, but servers themselves. You no longer have to buy and ship your own equipment. You can rent what you need and have it all set up for you. Even ongoing maintenance can be outsourced to the colo so that your only responsible for the applications you are running.

There is a blending of missions between colocation data centers and hosting companies. The colocation centers have become hosts with the addition of dedicated servers and even virtual servers.

The latest trend in IT is cloud computing and this is where colocation data centers are headed. One good example is PAETEC, a competitive telecom carrier with a national service footprint. PAETEC is known for it’s voice and data services that include T1 lines, DS3, SIP trunking, MPLS networks, OCx fiber optic bandwidth, and Ethernet over copper and fiber connections. Now PAETEC is on a major building spree to nearly triple its 7 data centers spread across the country.

What’s prompting this expansion? It’s all about the cloud. Corporate America has discovered cloud services as a way to control costs, increase flexibility and avoid sometimes unavailable capital investments in infrastructure. The idea of the cloud is very much like the concept of the colocation center with some capability expansions. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) allows you to rent all the servers and their related facilities that you need. The difference is that the architecture of the cloud is about making it easy to add and subtract resources rapidly. You can do that when servers are virtual and there are massive amounts of networked disk storage to draw from.

PAETEC is offering cloud-based products in their data centers that include dedicated servers, virtual servers, managed storage on demand and more. Hosted Exchange gives companies a Microsoft Exchange E-Mail server with PAETEC technicians and engineers available for support.

Is it time for your company to consider a move to the cloud or relocation to a colocation center to reduce costs and gain access to more resources as needed? If so, get pricing and availability of Cloud and Colocation Data Center Services near your location.



Note: Photo of clouds and building courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Infrastructure as a Service Providers

Cloud computing is generally acknowledged to comprise three levels. These are Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). The most basic of these and the foundation of the others is infrastructure in the cloud.

Infrastructure is pretty much what it sounds like. This the basic hardware and operating system software to make it work. Competition for infrastructure in the cloud is that same infrastructure in your own data center. So, why would you want to up and move to the cloud?

There are good business reasons for IaaS. Infrastructure is expensive to buy, it requires constant attention and frequent maintenance, and it starts going obsolete almost as soon as you have it installed. Computing infrastructure is also finicky. It needs a special temperature and humidity controlled environment, physical security and fire protection, and large amounts of both operating and backup power.

There’s also the matter of how much to buy. You certainly need enough resources to accommodate your anticipated daily activities. How about the unforeseen? It’s not that unusual for a company’s product to catch on suddenly, resulting in a flurry of unexpected orders. The same is true for any content that goes viral. One day you’re coasting along at a modest level of activity. The next day the word is out and your servers are brought to their knees by a sudden flurry of new users. All of the social networking sites have experienced this phenomenon at one time or another.

Cloud service providers offer a way to address the limitations of local data centers, often with a considerable cost advantage. Cloud infrastructure providers build a business on scale. They create a large data center with racks full of virtualized and dedicated servers. These are connected with pools of disk storage, security appliances, and multiple diverse network connectivity. All of this is housed in a high security, environmentally controlled facility with both battery and generator backup power.

Doesn’t this sound like what you’d find at a colocation center? Indeed, there are many similarities between colos and cloud service providers. One major difference is in elasticity. An elastic resource is one that can grow and shrink at will. When you install your equipment in a colocation facility or rent equipment and services from them, it is on a well defined contract. Certainly, you have the ability to change your requirements as business conditions improve or degrade. But there’s going to be a time lag of days, weeks or longer to make the necessary changes.

Cloud services are based on a model of utility computing. You don’t need to ask your electric company to give you more or less power. You simply turn equipment on and off. Only when your requirements exceed the maximum capacity you have installed, do you need to ask for a different level of service.

Infrastructure as a Service is based on a pay for what you use basis. The cloud service provider has far more servers, disk drives, Gbps of bandwidth and other resources that you can possibly use. Their economy of scale dictates that they serve many customers, each of whom has no awareness of the presence of the others. Your services are partitioned so that no other user will take your resources or interfere with your operation.

The advantage to business users is that IaaS gives them the resources they need, when they need them, at a cost that reflects actual usage and not spare installed capacity. Capital investments and perhaps difficult to obtain financing are not required. Staffing levels are reduced because the service provider takes care of operations and maintenance on a 24/7/365 basis.

Could your business benefit from using some or many cloud services? You can have a good basis to compare with what you are doing now by getting prices and services from cloud computing providers now.

New Phoenix Data Center Offers Colocation Services

Data centers are expanding as the business climate improves and companies pursue productivity increases and lower costs. Many businesses that never gave a second thought to using colocation facilities are taking another look. In the Southwest USA, a good place to consider is the new PAETEC Data Center in Phoenix, Arizona.

PAETEC has just cut the ribbon on their 4,400 square foot Phoenix data center as part of an expansion program that adds to their facilities in Bethlehem and Conshohocken, PA, Andover, MA., Houston, TX and Milwaukee, WI. Why? Customer demand. The role of Information Technology is changing and the “cloud” has a lot to do with it. PAETEC is positioning itself to capitalize on this movement with services that improve business continuity, information safeguarding, network latency reduction and a reduction of management needs.

The idea behind the cloud is one of economy of scale. You can have every company buying servers and racks, putting them in environmentally controlled rooms, providing the electrical power for both equipment and the cooling needed to take away the heat generated by the equipment, and hiring a staff to tend to the data center facilities. Alternatively, you can have a service provider create a much bigger facility and let companies buy their computing and storage services for a fee.

This is what cloud service providers do. They figure out the IT services that are common to many businesses and then provide those as a service themselves. But isn’t that six of one and a half dozen of another? How is the cloud a net saver of anything?

This is where economy of scale comes into play. The cost of operating a cloud services company doesn’t go up linearly with size. You need a certain amount of real estate, electrical power, HVAC, bandwidth and staffing to create a data center of any size. Having twice as many servers, disk drives and network appliances doesn’t necessarily mean you need to double your staff. Yes, you’ll need more floor space, air conditioning, electrical power and backup generation, but it probably won’t cost twice as much. The same is true for bandwidth. It gets cheaper by the Mbps and Gbps when you order big lines compared to little ones. Your staff can also be more specialized, since they are only dealing with a certain range of facilities and a defined set of services.

The contrast is even more dramatic when you compare the startup cost for small companies to create their own IT services compared to simply purchasing what is needed from a company that already has the facilities and expertise. Web site hosting, for instance, has gotten so cheap when purchased from a large hosting service that small businesses are hard pressed to justify buying and running their own servers. Many of them are now finding that offloading their telephone systems to a Hosted PBX service saves investment and staffing.

The colocation center fits somewhere in-between running your own facilities and outsourcing to the cloud. The colo offers the economy of scale for environmentally controlled and secure server space and WAN bandwidth. Yet, you have the option of providing your own equipment that you maintain yourself. Some colocation providers are now offering cloud-like services that include renting servers and storage they already have available and handling maintenance and repair through their 24/7 technical staff.

Should you be going to the cloud or relocating to a colocation facility instead of trying to do it all yourself? It may be time for a quick study to compare the capital and expense costs that you pay now with the monthly fees to get the same services outside. Get complementary support for pricing and availability of cloud and colocation services so you can do a good job.



Note: Photo of Phoenix skyline courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Business Booming For Telx Interconnection and Colocation

While many companies remain hunkered down and wringing their hands while they wait for the economy to improve, colo provider Telx is on a building boom at their premier data center in Chicago. What kind of sense does that make in recessionary America?

It makes lots of sense if you’re clued-in to what is transforming business and finance. It’s been a long time since accountants wore green eye shades and engineers worked slide rules. Most companies have adopted computer-based workstations connected to servers in the back room. This client-server architecture had a lot to do with increasing the speed of doing business and improving employee productivity in the last few decades. But now some of the savviest companies are adopting new methods and systems to give themselves an edge over their competitors.

Remember when the original justification for computerizing processes was elimination of paper? The “paperless office” became a joke as cheap laser printers and copiers spit out reams of paper faster than they could be hauled to the recycling bin. But when you consider how the speed and volume of transactions has increased, every desk should be piled to the ceiling and the aisles crammed full of paper documents. All the paper you don’t see is in the form of bits and bytes on hard drives spinning away inside your computer and in network storage within the data center. It’s turned out that less paper is the minor benefit of computerization. The big benefit is speed.

We simply do more faster. Companies don’t mail us product brochures anymore. We pull them up online. The time from identifying a need to researching solutions to placing an order has shrunk dramatically. It can all be done from the comfort of the desktop, sometimes in a matter of minutes. Need to coordinate team activities? Let them collaborate online so that those in Seattle can mark up documents for those in New York in real time.

Nowhere has the demand for speed become more dramatic than in the financial industry. You’ve heard of high frequency trading? These are complex algorithms running on high speed servers to electronically issue buy and sell orders to the markets. We’re at the point where milliseconds and even microseconds make a difference in trade profits. The Einsteinian limit of how fast light can move through glass and wire introduces a time delay between locations that simply can’t be reduced. So, how do you beat the competition? You get closer to the markets... physically closer. That’s what Telx provides. Its proximity to the exchanges and the buy-side and sell-side firms at Telx’s strategically collocated facilities. If the upper limit to your potential speed of transaction is a length of patch cord, you are in an advantageous position compared to the competitor hundreds or thousands of miles away.

Low latency colocation facilities near the action are essential for the most advanced players in high frequency finance. But there are other reasons for collocating with suppliers, customers and service providers. The cost of bandwidth is a good reason. With many competing carriers within arm’s reach, or at least down the hall, you’ve got access to the best rates per Mbps or Gbps and none of the expensive build-out costs of stringing wires or fiber cable for miles. If bandwidth is becoming one of your biggest expenses, moving to the colo facility can be a major cost saver. This can easily be the case if your product is video or high volume e-commerce or a popular application with millions of users.

Even smaller companies that aren’t located in a downtown sweet spot for low bandwidth prices may find that colocation gives them the advantage of keeping their physical location where it is but moving their bandwidth-hungry applications to where costs are lower. Cloud computing is another way to leverage the economy of scale in putting the software and servers where the bandwidth is cheapest and accessing the service from wherever you choose to be.

Does your company have demands for low latency or high bandwidth that would benefit from Telx or similar facilities? Are you just looking for ways to reduce your bandwidth costs? If so, you should take a look at the cost advantages of colocation and cloud computing services.