Emerson Network Power, a business section of Emerson that maximises availability, capacity and efficiency of critical infrastructure, has identified three areas of opportunity that colocation (colo) facilities must meet to motivate more data centre owners to move some or all applications to a colo.
The three areas are availability (monitoring potential outages and avoiding costly downtime), efficiency (conducting efficiency assessments to analyse where energy is being wasted), and scalability (scalable infrastructure equipment can make data centre deployment faster).
Franco Costa, vice president and general manager, AC Power business for Emerson Network Power in EMEA said: "Running a data centre is not a principal capability for the majority of businesses, and so colocation has become an increasingly attractive solution as data centres have developed in prominence, complexity and costs, and many have outgrown capacity. Companies often now select the colo model to provide the levels and types of services they need – whether its compute capability housed in a boutique, purpose-built colocation facilities or a wider array of services delivered through a cloud model."
According to a 2012 Data Center Knowledge report, not all data centre owners who would benefit from doing so have chosen to use colos. It was reported that 49% of enterprise data centre respondents said they used colos in some capacity, 3% were testing the concept and 9% planned to adopt within 24 months. The remaining 38% said they had no plans to adopt colocation.
To make colocation feasible for data centre owners, it must be able to meet all the requirements of an in-house data centre at lower cost and increased speed while delivering better reliability. Physical and IT security, energy costs, scalability and increased visibility are critical to a successful colocation conversion.
Costa adds: "Colo staff are early adopters of the best critical infrastructure technologies and solutions – typically they show a strong interest in innovation. Like any business, there are still gains to be made in the fields of availability, efficiency and scalability. However overall, the standards of performance are very high across the colo industry."
