Managed vs Unmanaged Colocation: Which is Right for your Business?

What is Colocation?

Colocation, in simple terms, is a hosting service which companies opt for power servers and hosting.

Various data centers offer these services to businesses, enterprises and start-ups. The benefits of power, space and ability to maintain and supervise server around the clock. Colocation data centers are of a great help to companies that want a competitive advantage without financial investments required to host within the company. Further, it also benefits in deployment time, uptime and the complete server.

Managed vs Unmanaged Colocation

There are various factors by which companies are benefitted by colocation services, starting from a great infrastructure, raised floors, cooling to surveillance. The money invested is only of the rack they rented. IT network of a company gets escalated by choosing the colocation services from a top rate data center.

Colocation has two sub-categories: Managed colocation and Unmanaged colocation. The choice from two of them can impact process, cost, and responsibility and involvement of datacenter.

The four levels at which Managed colocation differs from Unmanaged colocation can impact cost of operating a server is:

• Monitoring and Tracking
• Responding and Repairing
• Housing and Protecting
• Preventative Measures

Managed Colocation

The services of monitoring and tracking, repairing and problems and taking measures to protect data can be outsourced using Managed colocation services. This relieves the companies from the burden of managing disasters on their own. Unmanaged colocation services are the base of Managed colocation services. In managed colocation data centers, the enterprise can outsource these services at a lower cost.

These services can include:

• Capacity Planning
• Multi-probe Monitoring, Alerts, and Logging
• Technical Support
• On-site Backup and/or Off-site Backup
• First Responder, Troubleshooting, and Remediation
• Part Replacement and Service
• Patch Management
• Asset Tracking
• Threat Management

These services can impact the business big time if executed properly; companies can enjoy lesser chance of downtime or data loss. Managed colocation gives enterprises the comfort to choose from a variety of services they would like to outsource without releasing total control.  

The managed colocation data center provides the power to companies to work without hindrances as their servers will be backed up and secure at all times, along with choosing solutions according to their needs.

Unmanaged Colocation

Unmanaged colocation gives companies the authority of data centre’s infrastructure while maintaining responsibility for server issues. The best advantages of Unmanaged colocation are security and space and the other advantages which affect the choice between the two are:

• data communications connections
• environmental controls
• power supplies
• security devices

Tier rating is an important factor which defines the ability of the data center to safeguard itself from disasters, the higher tier rating, the safer the data center. A Tier IV data center is capable of staying less affected by downtime and power failures and provides a higher redundancy on power and network.

The two choices can affect your business on a high level as you will be able to choose whether to take your machine and install it on their rack or rent the server machine from the datacenter itself. Price shouldn't be the main factor affecting the choice as colocation is a long-term investment. The choice between managed and unmanaged colocation can affect the security and success of your business.

How Colocation Data Centres Use Modern Technology?

Colocation services mainly provide physical security, power, building, and cooling to the consumer who issues the servers and storage. The area of these services are either rented or leased according to the room, cage, cabinet or the rack. Many colocation services also provide for the business to purchase managed services for their servers and other computer hardware.

Is Choosing Colocation A Wise Decision?

There are several reasons for why a business should opt for this service rather than building their own data center. The primary benefit is efficiency, as erecting a building and maintaining and continuously updating such an enormous technological potential is costly and time-consuming. Fundamentally, colocation server were utilised by private businesses as backup and recovery as a disaster management option. Now, this colocation server is mostly being used by cloud service providers.

The primary advantages are-

• Power supply
• Cooling system facility
• Provides great network connectivity and bandwidth
• Bestows well-handled services that allows a 24*7 access to server administrators
• Contributes in security protection like firewalls and antivirus protection
• Grants complete security for physical access to the servers and other hardware computing

Stepping up with the technologically advanced world.

Cloud flexibility-

There are a lot of hardships associated with a cloud for which colocation data center have to be prepared. There have been many instances of power outages and other imperfections that require to be dealt with. Hence, as a prolonged solution colocation data center have come up with:

• The creation and maintenance of dismissal at hardware as well as software level.
• Safeguarding the logical connection amongst the distributed data centers.
• Ensuring the easy regulation and management of WAN operation and circulation.
• The creation and maintenance of the data center load balancing and mirroring.
• The complete utilisation of innovative disaster recovery services exclusively designed for the cloud.

Colocation data center operating system-

It is not just about management of a data center but about the advanced data center infrastructure management or DCIM and actually about the data center operating system. This is the main difference between colocation facilities and the facility that does not provide colocation services. Data centers have always been and still continue to become the distributed entity in a business. The main factors that must be considered while working with DCIM-

• Not necessarily the best affordable solution.
• The things to look for are energy efficiency, visibility of assets and capacity planning.
• Complete utilisation and planning of spacing and resources.

Skillful storage and systems-

Mostly colocation consumers endow for their own storage and systems, yet many facilities provide solutions for cost reduction such as installing platforms and systems that are merged to increase efficiency. High density computing solutions are always able to empower within a smaller framework. This gives the server administrators the ability to put more consumers and increased amount workloads on a lesser amount of servers even within a small framework. The usage of SSD and flash controllers has given the server administrators the ability to cut the operating cost of storage. The use of flash storage not only helps in going easy on the cash but also saves energy and space. However, this technology is still limited in deployment. The arrangement is still a little bit costly and there have been some worries for using this technology for a long drag.

Eco-friendly option-

Going green was usually considered a costly option, but with the betterment in technology this perception has changed. There has been a realization that opting for an environmentally friendly solution will help you go easy on the cash.

The techniques that are being adopted by the data centers including colocation data centers are:

• Low power servers- This reduces the utilisation of power and space up to 10 percent.
• Utilising low carbon and grid independent technology with cleaner power generation.
• Reduction in capital expenditure around 15-30%.
• Lacerating Power Usage Effectiveness by using chiller free data centers.
• The usage of power proportional computing has helped to reduce power consumption and waste.
• The usage of Memristors has supported the creation of low energy yet powerful integrated devices.

With ever increasing advancements in technology it will become progressively crucial for colocation data center administrators step up in the competition and adopt modern means of technology.  

What Factors Are Driving Data Center Growth in India?

In India, billions of rupees are spent on data centre infrastructure to cater to the ever-growing needs of businesses. Choosing the right data center infrastructure has become far more difficult for the companies trying to differentiate themselves in this technology-driven world.

Some factors driving such need are as follows:

·         Lot of companies have taken the decision to merge their collection of server rooms and data centers into a centralized regional sites.

·         Compression technology and virtualization is enabling companies to do more with their technology assets. This means that the companies are able to deploy and use heavy applications thereby increasing datacenter demand.

·         Cloud-based solutions are increasing rapidly and it requires more data center infrastructure to support their offerings.

As per survey, some of the key findings to assess the factors which are driving datacenter growth are as follows:

ü  Operators at the centers are able to understand the energy efficiency levels of the industry

ü  Manufacturers and suppliers are able to understand the growth opportunities and current trends

ü  Hosted data centre and captive space is expected to increase its costs

ü  Major industries driving the growth of data centres are Banking, Financial services and Insurance(BFSI), IT and ITeS, Social media, Analytics and Mobile

ü  Forceful Government policies to increase on digitalization of records enables its growth

ü  More and more data centre services is opening new avenues for providers to attract new and modern customers. They offer services like virtualization, cloud computing, disaster recovery and even data centre extensions. These new services are evolving and moving  more organizations to data centre model.

ü  Datacenters are becoming a hub for big data management and big data services. These types of services would only continue to grow for the data centre model as a big data.

ü  Use of Wide Area Network (WAN), cloud and internet services have truly exploded. The central hub for connectivity and data distribution is responsible for housing some of the latest technologies out there.

ü  The world has become more connected and new types of load balancing solutions enable global traffic management and controls. Data centre is a node within a large cluster of interconnected data centre environments. It is a formulation of cloud and globally connected networking environment.

Considering all the factors like surging energy costs, decreasing organizational budgets, adoption of different servers in data centers and a boost in preferences for process outsourcing are paving way for vendors to expand their presence throughout the country.

The rising growth of data center facilities in India are followed by certain driven factors like high bandwidth speed, energy savings and power, state of art of infrastructure and cutting the edge of technology used by the service providers. These factors are maximizing the company’s business value and by reducing their variable costs.

How Colocation Helps Businesses with Need for Low Latency and Scalability

Colocation has helped many companies over the past few years to set up dynamic, scalable, high-speed, low latency and a competitive IT environment. Investing capital expenditure into data centers in today's economic fragility is not viable. CIOs are burdened to deal with uncomfortable truth like Return on Investments and to increase the total cost of ownership before the IT investments can be done. These tight budget approval system has forced IT leaders to look for some alternate and better technology strategies that help in gaining from less investment.

In 2010, world's leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals which provide customers with competitive advantage, Thomson Reuters, launched Elektron. It is a real-time network hosting environment, which meets strong demand for fast and costs effective access to emerging cash equities market in India. It allows asset managers, hedge funds, brokerage houses, exchanges, banks and other participants to be able to connect to world's largest financial community and to reach global trading partners over the network securely.

Challenges Lying Ahead

There are many challenges faced by enterprises. Some of them are mentioned below:

·        Stability of the IT setup

·        Scalability and reliability

·        Ultra-high speed and low latency network

·        Heterogeneous Environment

·        A skilled workforce that can manage 24x7 monitoring and management.

Most of the challenges can be coped up by firstly short listing the colocation hosting services that provide scalable, dynamic, low latency, high speed and competitive IT environment. The Chief Technology Officer at Thomson Reuters, Paresh Hegde also faced similar challenges and turned towards colocation. 

Benefits of Colocation:

Colocation hostingcompanies have helped many enterprises. Colocation services take almost most of the companies IT infrastructure operations, which helps them to focus on growing their business globally. Here are some benefits listed below:

·        Secure, robust, scalable and highly available IT infrastructure for company’s customers with negligible downtime.

·        When IT infrastructure is being managed by a third party infrastructure partner, the company can reliably be assured of hassle free and smooth IT infrastructure operations. And they can now focus on growing their business in the country as well as globally.

·        ‘Pay as you use’ model has a fixable cost structure and it helps companies to easily derive significant cost benefits.

·        Third party data hosting centre also helps with substantial savings in time and cost. No need of investing a huge amount of capital expenditure.

Conclusion

Most of the CIOs are looking for solutions to address their over-utilized data centres or to say it positively while looking at growth projects or data centre expansion, they should evaluate their options carefully.

There are many solutions to address these challenges, but the trick lies in choosing the right path which can fit and helps with organization's short and long-term goals. And doing so, along with keeping parameters like reliability, performance, cost optimization and reduction, and at the top of priority list – ease of management. Colocation is the answer as it offers several more advantages which can help businesses to grow significantly.