A Colocation center is a type of data center, where space, bandwidth are available for rental. The organization basically provides, physical safety of your server with rental charges on space, bandwidth, network facility and safety of the server at a minimal cost. The organization, handles many customer servers under the same roof.
Sometimes, the organization might provide you the data center management as well. This is quiet common in IT sector, due to the connectivity over internet. Organizations, like to focus on IT work instead of managing and building its own data center. However, when your organization is considering Colocation facility , you need to focus on the Service Level agreement, and look if it has some hidden rules or charges.
In my experience, my organization has have a colocation facility for its DR system. We have the production system in our own data center. Since, DR system needs to be kept at another location, taking up Colocation was a best choice, as we need not require to build another data-center for DR system. But, yes Colocation facility could be a concern if you manually need to visit the site often. That would incur to additional expenses. In our case, we had a agreement with the Colocation provider to raise ticket with them to provide any authorized person to get access to it when needed. And when need arises, we let the Vendor IBM to provide Customer Engineer (CE) to visit that location and fix the issues. Though, this is little tedious compared to getting CE at our own premises, but its manageable. For, AS400 system colocation facility is apt according to me as this is quite robust and does not usually need a manual intervention.
Sometimes, the organization might provide you the data center management as well. This is quiet common in IT sector, due to the connectivity over internet. Organizations, like to focus on IT work instead of managing and building its own data center. However, when your organization is considering Colocation facility , you need to focus on the Service Level agreement, and look if it has some hidden rules or charges.
In my experience, my organization has have a colocation facility for its DR system. We have the production system in our own data center. Since, DR system needs to be kept at another location, taking up Colocation was a best choice, as we need not require to build another data-center for DR system. But, yes Colocation facility could be a concern if you manually need to visit the site often. That would incur to additional expenses. In our case, we had a agreement with the Colocation provider to raise ticket with them to provide any authorized person to get access to it when needed. And when need arises, we let the Vendor IBM to provide Customer Engineer (CE) to visit that location and fix the issues. Though, this is little tedious compared to getting CE at our own premises, but its manageable. For, AS400 system colocation facility is apt according to me as this is quite robust and does not usually need a manual intervention.
