Colocation Hosting Offers Lower Costs and More

By: John Shepler

Traditionally, having your own data center has been the way to go for medium and larger businesses. It may still be the best answer for your needs. However, there are advantages to moving at least some of your equipment and data to a colocation hosting facility. Let’s have a look at why this might be a great idea.

Just What is Colocation?
Colocation sounds like it means having two or more operations in one location. That’s pretty much it. Colocation facilities were originally called carrier hotels. Multiple service providers would locate equipment in the same building run by one of the carriers or a third party who provided common services such as HVAC, AC power, backup generator power, and connectivity as needed. It was a way for carriers to easily exchange traffic on neutral turf and not have to each pay for their own building.

Nowadays colocation facilities or “colos” serve businesses as well as carriers. They are still a great way to connect to the Internet with as much bandwidth as you need at the best prices and connect to various carriers who also happen to be in the facility. Compare that with trying to get 10 Gbps or 100 Gbps out in the boonies.

In addition to bandwidth, colocation centers offer rack space, cabinets, cages and the power, cooling and connections to go with them. You generally bring your own servers and storage and take responsibility for maintaining your equipment. Many colos also now offer expanded tech services to monitor and service equipment 24/7 and may even lease you servers and other equipment you would normally buy.

Why Pay Someone Else to Host My Servers?
It may seem logical to keep everything under one roof, but that doesn’t necessarily give you everything you need. For one thing, you have no redundancy in the event of a disaster. A tornado, hurricane, earthquake or flood can wipe out your data center and you’ll be out of business for awhile. If you keep all your backups in the same data center, that could take a long while and very expensive to recreate all the data you need.

By having at least some of your servers and storage offsite, you gain the advantage of redundant facilities. It works even better if your sites are geographically dispersed.

As mentioned previously, you’ll likely find much better connectivity at better prices in a colocation center. Carriers go where many potential customers are clustered so that they can quickly and easily provide service. It’s just a cable run in the colo.

Are you able to provide tech service 24/7? Most colocation facilities have their own tech staffs available round the clock to handle their equipment and often provide a suite of services to their customers.

Think about the cost of expansion. If you are running out of space now, you have a make or buy decision to face. Making means building or leasing a larger facility to accommodate your growing needs, including more backup power, tech support, and security. Buying means avoiding the capital investment in facilities and leasing from a colo, likely at much lower cost that doing it all yourself.

Another area where colos shine is being physically close to your customers to reduce transmission latency. That’s more important if you have latency sensitive real-time applications and if you are selling your service nationwide or worldwide. Some of the larger colos have multiple sites so that you can disperse your equipment as needed.

Is your business growing and creating a need for additional data center capacity or would you simply prefer to lease rather than buy the IT facilities you need? If so, consider the advantages of colocation hosting and get competitive quotes now.

Carrier Neutral Connectivity at Colocation Data Centers

By: John Shepler

Companies feeling starved for bandwidth may not realize that they’re doing it the hard way. Instead of making the carriers come to you, there are advantages in you going to where the carriers are.

It’s All Happening at the Colo
The places where carriers flock are called colocation or colo centers and carrier hotels. These are large data centers that are meant to serve a variety of tenants. Contrast that with the typical data center that serves only a single company. In fact, most companies want nothing to do with renting out space in their data centers. The security issues alone make them blanch.

Why Do Colocation Centers Exist?
It has to do with economy of scale. Say you have 100 companies and each one needs a data center. They may well construct their own in-house data centers sized to meet their needs. This involves creating a dedicated space that is environmentally controlled, secure, with fire protection and backup power. Uninterruptible power supplies based on batteries and inverters cover short term power glitches. Anything over a few minutes depends on diesel or gas generators outside.

Data Center Costs
As you might expect, there is considerable cost involved in building and running a data center. Aside from the initial capital investment, there are constant operating costs involving air conditioning, electric power and support personnel. These costs persist regardless of business level and the equipment may sit idle for two-thirds of the day. Smaller companies often can’t justify the expense of round-the-clock tech support.

Connectivity Counts
What level of bandwidth you can get and how much it will cost are largely a function of where you are located. If your offices are in a smaller town or rural area, you may have only a single provider to pick from and severe bandwidth limits.

Economy of Scale
Now, what if those same 100 companies decided it would make more sense if they all moved into a single much larger data center that would serve all of their needs. You might think the overall total cost would be similar, but actually they would be much lower.

It’s the economy of scale that saves. Each company only needs racks and cages large enough to house its servers and other equipment. A few larger backup generators can supply emergency power when needed instead of 100 smaller generators on standby. A common security force can handle access control and monitor intrusion sensors. A common tech support group can handle the occasional needs of all companies 24/7.

From Owner to Renter
The tenant companies switch from an ownership to a rental model. They don’t need to overbuild, because they can always rent more or less facilities as needed. The colo operator takes the responsibility of building the facility, providing utilities, security and tech support.

A Magnet for Carriers
Have you ever had a carrier tell you that it’s just too expensive to bring fiber optic service to your company? They might do it, but you’ll be responsible for the construction costs and they can be eye-popping. The colo center, howler, acts like a carrier magnet. They see 100 potential customers for their service and make their fiber available. Most colo centers are near populous areas, making the construction relatively easy.

Will you have a carrier to provide you bandwidth service at the colo? Most likely, you’ll have at least several and perhaps a lot more. Each carrier has its own colo space with racks and cages. It costs them little more to bring in high bandwidth service for 100 companies than a single customer. That, plus the competition of having multiple carriers bidding for your business, makes pricing more attractive than it might be to your own facility.

Meet Me for Service
Colos have an ingenious setup called the “meet me” room or MMR. This is an area dedicated to making cross-connections. The colo operator runs copper or fiber cabling to your racks from the MMR. They also run copper or fiber from the carriers to the MMR. When you contract for bandwidth, the colo patches you to the carrier and you’re all set. If you change your mind, you can work out the next contract with a different carrier and the colo will simply move your patch cord.

One additional advantage of using an MMR is that there is no “local loop” charge because the colo is providing the “last mile” or, in actuality, “last foot” connection.

Two Types of Colos
You should know that there are a couple different types of colos. One is operated by a single carrier. They build the facility for their own needs and then rent out extra space. You can get really high bandwidth and reasonable prices in such a facility, but you may have only one or a few carriers to pick from.

The second type of colo is operated by a third party who is in the colocation business and doesn’t favor any customer or carrier. These are often called carrier neutral facilities because you aren’t required to connect to any particular bandwidth provider.

Clouds and Colos
Cloud services are often located in colocation facilities. This gives the cloud provider a facility to support their extensive servers and storage. If you are collocated within the same facility, then it’s a simple wire or fiber connection to hook you up with one or more cloud service providers.

Are your data center costs higher than you would like or are you having trouble getting the WAN bandwidth you need to support your business? This would be a good time to investigate what’s available from a number of colocation centers and cloud service providers.

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.

New York City Internet Infrastructure

When it comes to high bandwidth network services, you would expect New York City to be among the most infrastructure rich places in the world. You’d be right. One key hub in this infrastructure is the network colocation center at 60 Hudson Street in lower Manhattan. This is where Telx operates their flagship carrier hotel and network interconnection facility.

In a recent article in The Atlantic, Ben Mendelsohn discusses his short documentary, Bundled, Buried & Behind Closed Doors, which includes a tour of the Telx facility at 60 Hudson. You can watch it right here and get a fascinating view into the inner workings of network interconnections, like those at the heart of the Internet.



The Telx data center at 60 Hudson is their flagship colocation and interconnection facility. Within the walls of the old Western Union Building, Telx offers low-latency access to more than 400 carriers, financial exchanges, application providers, media and content providers, SaaS providers and other enterprises through a single connection. This is why companies that need high bandwidth, low latency connections choose to colocate at 60 Hudson or in another Telx facility. It’s hard to get much closer to your service provider than to be situated in the same building.

Cross connections are at the heart of the Telx colocation centers. This is nothing more than simple wired or fiber connections from a customer’s equipment rack, cabinet or cage to a passive interconnection panel in the interconnection space. The cross connect allows you to connect to any of the other services in the facility. If you change your mind or want connection to additional providers, it’s a simple matter of patching from your panel to theirs.

In addition to the passive cross connects, Telx also offers dynamic interconnections. They are a pioneer in Ethernet Exchange through a E-NNI or Ethernet Network to Network Interface. What this service does is allow Ethernet service providers to connect to each other through a standardized interface so that each provider extends the reach of their network. This is especially valuable for IP core networks which would otherwise have to first convert another protocol like SONET/SDH to achieve commonality with other networks.

In addition to 60 Hudson Street in New York City, Telx has another facility at 111 Eighth Avenue in NYC, two locations in New Jersey, two facilities in Chicago, two more in Dallas, plus colocation and interconnection centers in San Francisco, Atlanta, Miami, Phoenix, Charlotte, Los Angeles and Santa Clara. That’s 15 buildings spread out nationwide, with at least one close to your business location. They also have partnerships with Tata and Interxion for global locations.

If you have a need for high speed Internet access, cloud access, content delivery, low latency connections or other private line or network services, it is well worth your while to look into services and pricing for colocation and interconnection services from Telx and other premier service providers.

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.

What Type of Data Center Connectivity Do You Need?

If you are considering a move to a colo center or setting up an off-site data center or private cloud for your company, you’ll have some challenges and opportunities for connectivity arrangements. Let’s see what to consider and where those cost savings opportunities are.

The difference between on-campus and remote data centers, including colocation facilities, is the contrast between local wiring where you have complete control of the network versus leasing network connections through service providers. Chances are that you have a relationship with a bandwidth provider now for dedicated Internet access and private lines to other company facilities. You’ll simply be expanding that relationship with your current or other competitive service providers.

There are two types of connectivity to be concerned about for data center bandwidth, not counting the local wiring interconnecting your equipment in the racks. That local wiring is the same as you would have if the servers, disks and network appliances were located down the hall instead of across town or in another state. The other connections you need are from your equipment racks to the outside world and from your existing facilities to the colo center.

The largest bandwidth consumption will likely be WAN bandwidth connected to your servers at the data center. This is one of the biggest advantages to relocating off-site. Colocation facilities are attractive to carriers, who establish network points of presence within the facility to serve all of the businesses collocating there. Not just one carrier, either. There’s just too much business to be had concentrated within the walls of the colo. Several, if not many, carriers will set up shop in the colo and try to garner as much WAN bandwidth business as they can. That’s why colocation centers are often called “carrier hotels.”

The advantage to you is that there are multiple providers all vying for your business. Since you are typically all located within a single building, there are no issues regarding construction of lines. The lines are a few hundred meters at most running from a carrier’s equipment to yours through colo provided conduit. Both copper and fiber are readily available. In fact, the colo center may provide the connections themselves to keep everything standardized.

As you might suspect, the ease of connection and competing carriers makes for excellent prices on bandwidth. You’ll likely find better prices per Mbps or Gbps in the colo center than you will for the lines connecting your current facility. That’s a major strategic advantage for colo providers. You want to move your high traffic equipment, especially any services provided via the Internet, to the colo.

There is a bandwidth tradeoff involved. Since your servers are now located remotely, you’ll need bandwidth to communicate with them. The trade generally works out that the bandwidth needed to connect employees to operate the collocated equipment is less than the bandwidth needed to connect all users, including customers, to that same equipment. If colocation makes sense for your operation, there should be a net savings on your telecom services expenses overall. If not, that savings needs to come from reduced capital expenditures, facilities operation and maintenance, power and HVAC, and staffing. Sometimes you can save in all these areas through colocation.

Are you ready to consider a move to an off-site data center or colocation facility? Be sure to factor in your bandwidth needs and potential savings now available. Check availability and pricing for data center connectivity now.



Note: Photo of data center servers courtesy of WikimediaCommons

Colocation vs Cloud Services

The classic make/buy decision revolves around doing things in-house versus outsourcing. For IT managers, this has often come down to a comparison between running an in-house data center and moving everything to a colocation facility. Now there’s a third wrinkle. It’s the cloud.

Both colocation and cloud services have the similarity of being purchased from outside vendors. To the end user, the difference may be trivial. But to someone close to the situation there is a world of difference between colocation and the cloud. Or, is there?

The advantage of colocation facilities is that they provide a physical environment optimized for information technology needs. The colo center is a robust building with rack space all set up with power and cooling. It’s the same support system you would install yourself to support your servers and other data center equipment. You’ll need backup power, of course, fire suppression and physical security. You can’t afford to turn your back on expensive, demanding and possibly temperamental systems, so you need technical staff on duty or nearby. Then there’s the matter of bandwidth connections.

One factor driving many companies to colocation facilities is the need for far greater levels of bandwidth than are available at their current location. This is especially true in smaller towns and rural areas. You need fiber optic services and the best you get is bonded T1. But move to a colo and you’ll be surrounded by carriers who have points of presence in-house and within an easy drop of your equipment cage. You can get all the bandwidth you need, virtually on demand, and at lower prices than you’ll find locally. Why move the whole company when you can simply move a few racks of gear and meet your requirements?

This is the territory that is also now being served by the cloud. The “cloud” is a nebulous (pun intended) term for outsourced information technology services owned and operated by a third party. With a colo center you buy a server and ship it to the colocation operator. In some cases, you rent a server and perhaps the tech support to manage it. But you are responsible for the applications software and operation of the system. When you buy from the cloud, you don’t worry about hardware or software. You are simply purchasing a service. The mechanics behind how that service operates belongs to the cloud service provider.

What can you get from the cloud? Perhaps a specific service. Perhaps everything you need to run your business. This is a new field exhibiting the rapid growth that typifies introduction of a disruptive technology. Buy supercomputing in the cloud when you can’t justify or afford full-time use of a supercomputer on-premises. Get all your office applications through the cloud and say goodbye to software patches and upgrades, not to mention racks of servers in the back room. Perhaps all you need is cloud networking to create a worldwide converged voice and data network for your international business.

What’s best for your business? The answer will very specific to your needs. Perhaps all three approaches will work, but one will have a superior cost/performance characteristic for what you are doing right now. Want some help getting the numbers together? Get quotes for colocation and cloud networking services quickly and easily. Then work through the options and pick what’s optimum for your business.



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

Advantage of Colocation Services

Businesses are often faced with make or buy decisions. Do you create a product or service in-house or go outside to a vendor who specializes in that field? The same question arises related to telephone and computer services. So, what’s the right answer?

Like most everything, technical services decisions are very specific to your particular situation at any given time. That’s why you should revisit these issues on a regular basis - say yearly. You know what the advantages are to buying and managing your telephone and computer systems in-house. What are the advantages to going outside?

I’m going to focus on a very specific set of services you can buy, called colocation. Colocation is not quite the same as going to the “cloud,” but there are some similarities. What colocation really means is moving your telephone and/or computing resources into another facility called a colocation center or carrier hotel.

As you might suspect, there are various degrees of colocation involvement. The one that generally comes to mind is packing up your data center equipment and shipping it to a colocation facility. Within this facility, you or the facility staff re-install your equipment in a locked caged area that is not accessible to other customers of the colocation center.

What’s the point of that? It’s an economy of scale in several areas. You’ll only save on real estate if you are pressed for space now or are paying a premium per square foot in a high rent building. But it’s not just the physical footprint that’s important. The “colo” center provides equipment racks, electrical power, cooling air and physical security. They have all the power you can possibly use and the HVAC equipment to carry away the heat from high performance servers and switches. They also have backup systems in place so that you don’t need to worry about power outages. That can be important if you are located in an area subject to storm outages or questionable power lines.

Many companies move to colocation centers simply for access to unlimited amounts of cheap bandwidth. Cheap is relative, but bandwidth costs per Mbps at colocation centers are probably better than you can get at your facility. There are multiple carriers located in the same building who establish points of presence for their fiber optic networks. Construction costs are minimal, if anything, because it’s just a matter of getting a drop from a carrier’s cage to yours. If you are in a location where you are bandwidth limited, with no fiber options or sky-high construction costs, simply relocating to a colocation center can solve the problem. You still communicate with your remote facilities using T1 lines or other available bandwidth.

In addition to facilities, colocation centers are staffed around the clock. This is a real boon to smaller companies that can’t afford a 24/7 tech staff. Even larger companies may benefit from having server experts literally a few feet away from their equipment at all times. You can maintain your own equipment, of course, or hire the center personnel to perform upgrades and patches.

You also have the option to rent equipment rather than supply your own at many colocation centers. Why come up with the capital expense for new servers every few years (or few months) when you can rent fully managed servers dedicated for your use only? This approach can also make sense for telephone equipment. Why have an expensive PBX phone system on your premises and the staff to keep it running, when you can use a remote PBX that an expert provider buys and maintains?

These questions are the heart of make-buy decisions. More and more, companies are finding it makes more sense to rent from a large facilities provider than maintain equivalent systems in-house. How about your business? Could you do better at a colo center? Find out by getting colocation services prices and availability that you can compare with your own costs to make an informed decision.

Making The Move For Higher Bandwidth

Is your organization bandwidth frustrated? With online technology moving as fast as it has been, many organizations find that the bandwidth they need exceeds the bandwidth they have. Ok, no problem. Just call up your service provider and tell them to crank up the line speed. Oh, no. They say you have all the speed you can get. Now what?

Have you considered moving? The sad truth is that bandwidth availability and pricing are highly location dependent. Some locations offer a wealth of options and low prices. Others may not even be able to support your basic needs no matter how much you are willing to spend.

There are two ways to move. You can relocate physically or you can relocate virtually. Between the two, you should find an acceptable solution.

Physical relocation is what it says. You pack up and move to another building. If you’ve been thinking of doing this anyway because you’ve run out of space or the rent has gotten to high, or you’d like to be closer to your customer base or suppliers, then lack of bandwidth could be the impetus that gets you going.

Don’t just blindly pick a spot based without checking out broadband availability first. You may be in for a rude shock. Sometimes service is available across the street, but not where you are. It’s hard to tell by looking, at least from the outside. You might talk to other tenants if you’ll have neighbors in the facility. See what they have for telephone and connectivity. Tenants of the buildings next to your pick should also be close enough to give you an idea if the bandwidth you want is available.

The best way to know for sure is to get competitive quotes from a telecom broker. Generally you need an address and telephone number for that address to get accurate quotes. Your consultants can work with you on getting something close enough to ensure you won’t be disappointed when you actually order service.

What if you can’t move or really don’t want to? In that case, a virtual move may be in order. Keep your offices and staff in place. What you’ll be moving is your servers and any appliances that need high bandwidth connections. Where will you be going? To a colocation center, of course. A colo, or carrier hotel, is a facility that provides rack space, power, cooling, and bandwidth for many clients. The cost of bringing bandwidth to your particular equipment is trivial because the service providers are also present in the colo facility. It’s usually just a matter of a wire or fiber line to another room. You can relocate the equipment you have now or sometimes rent servers that the colo technical staff maintain.

Are you ready to make the move for higher bandwidth? Before you make any commitments, be sure to talk with a Telarus expert consultant. You’ll get options, recommendations and prices on what services are available at your candidate destinations.

Why Colo Bandwidth Pricing Is Lowest

Want to see something that will make you jealous? Get a pricing quote for colocation bandwidth.

Sickening, isn’t it? Or is it? Sure, the cost per Mbps at the colo center is much less than you are paying to bring in the same bandwidth to your server racks. Even if you can get a serious cost reduction on your line services by using a telecom broker like Telarus, you’ll still pay less when you co-locate. Is that fair?

Sure it is. The cost reduction you find at colocation facilities comes from a couple of sources. First, there are likely to be a lot more carriers serving that facility than your building. They flock there because they know that they’ll find lots of bandwidth hungry customers all in one spot. These carriers can hear the cash registers going ka-ching! all the while they are bringing in their fiber optic lines. Of course, that ka-ching! sound is ringing in every carrier’s ear. Pretty soon they are battling to get the most customers with the highest bandwidth requirements. That drives prices down and encourages even more customers to move into the “carrier hotel,” as colos are often called.

Beyond fierce competition from multiple service providers, bandwidth costs are low because connection costs are trivial. You know the last mile connection? Yes, the line from your facility to the carrier’s closest point of presence? If you are using copper or SONET fiber, chances are that the last mile is being leased from the incumbent local telephone company. They put the cables in the ground and they expect to get paid for their use, especially if they are being used by a competitive carrier. Inside the colocation center there is no last mile. You have a hard time running a mile of cable even if you wrapped it around the building a few dozen times. That last mile is reduced to the last 100 feet, and it is often installed by colo center personnel. They simply run a drop, fiber or copper, from the carrier “meet me room” to your rack. Plug it in and you are connected.

Lots of competition and easy connections are the reasons behind those mouth watering colocation bandwidth prices. The question becomes, “how can you get in on the action?”

The obvious answer is to move to the colo facility. But what about the costs of space and utilities? They’re probably lower than what you pay now, especially if you are renting. Economy of scale keeps the cost of electricity, HVAC, security, fire suppression, and backup power at reasonable rates. You can even outsource the installation and maintenance of your equipment to the colocation center technical staff. They’re always on duty anyway. Is your staff?

Before you brush off the idea of packing up and moving your high bandwidth server equipment to a colo center, run the numbers. Compare costs of facilities and bandwidth and see which makes more sense. It can be a real eye-opener... and cost saver.

Telx Minimizes Latency WIth Colocation Near Carriers

If latency is important to your applications, you want to be as close as possible to your service providers. Why? Because no matter how fast your equipment runs, the lower limit to latency is the propagation of the the signal itself. In a vacuum, that’s a millisecond per 186 miles. Through copper or fiber, it just gets longer. Add-in a collection of routers and switchers and it gets a lot, lot longer. Think about being right next to your service provider with nothing but a short link in-between. How can you do that? Think Telx.

Telx is a colocation and interconnection company. They specialize in putting customers and service providers in close proximity. It starts with having colocation centers in 9 states with 15 sites. These are strategically located in key locations near media hubs, cable landings, fiber paths and exchanges. There are 4 locations in the New York Metro Area, two in Chicago, two in Dallas, three in California, including Los Angeles, San Francisco and Santa Clara, and others in Atlanta, Miami, Phoenix and Charlotte.

Telx prides itself on having a network-neutral environment that supports over 750 telecommunications carriers, ISPs, content, cloud and SaaS (Software as a Service) providers. They already have over 28,000 direct connections. What this does is put your business in close proximity to the services you seek. Latency is certainly minimized by all being in the same facility or at least on the same backbone network, but cost is also minimized. With so many services just a patch cord away, you can get excellent prices on bandwidth and other IT services.

If your needs are critical and your demands high, you may well benefit from getting colo rack space in a Telx facility. They are all set up to support your rack, cabinet or cage with highly reliable power and cooling. Most facilities can provide you with 120v 2089v, 480v AC and -48v DC power.

In addition to space, power, HVAC and security, Telx has technicians available to support installations, turn up and provisioning of network equipment and circuits, right down to server reboots. They also have something called a “Virtual Xchange” that offers circuit multiplexing and demultiplexing, protocol conversions, law conversions and other grooming solutions. Their carrier hotel Meet Me Room encompasses the entire colocation center, with a passive and secure area called a Meet Me Area for customer interconnections via cross connects.

Network services are available that go way beyond mere bandwidth connections. There is video exchange, Internet exchange, managed security services and cloud computing as network enabled services.

Are your network and computing needs critical enough that minimizing latency offers a significant performance advantage, or are you just looking at colocation services as an opportunity to get better deals on bandwidth and minimize support operations at your own facility? If so, you could benefit by getting competitive quotes for server colocation services.

Colocation Hosting Bandwidth Options

Where do you get the best deals on bandwidth? Where the telecommunications carriers are, of course. The farther you get from a carrier's POP or Point of Presence, the more you'll pay per Mbps for WAN bandwidth. That means there's only one thing to do. Move in with the carrier. Pack your servers because that really is the right solution.

Do carrier's actually take in boarders? Indeed, they do. CLECs or Competing Local Exchange Carriers often have termination equipment located on the premises of the ILEC or Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier. That's so they can get access to telephone lines to offer competing voice and data services. But what about other businesses?

Business meet carriers at a facility known as a colocation center or carrier hotel. The colocation center, or colo, is sometimes operated by a single competitive carrier. Others are run by third parties offering neutral territory to competing carriers and businesses all looking to make the best deals for IT services. The center operator provides a clean, secure, environmentally controlled building with wiring support infrastructure and backup power.

When you move into a colocation center, you usually bring your own servers and other network appliances. In some centers, you can rent servers on an exclusive or shared basis. You rent rack space for as many units as you need. Power and cooling are provided. You have the option to secure entire racks in locked cages for higher physical security. This is often called colocation hosting, regardless of who supplies the actual server equipment.

You connection to the outside world, including your own network access, is negotiated with the carrier of your choice. You may have several to choose from in a larger facility. Carriers are as anxious to be where the businesses are as businesses are anxious to have proximity to carrier services. Carriers have their own racks or rooms of termination equipment, just like businesses users. Service providers and service users get together in a "meet me" room or with a service drop from their switching rack to your server.

What types of bandwidth deals are available? Usually the best prices on each level of service. Remember that there are essentially no construction costs to provide you with service. Perhaps just a one-time fee for a service drop that may even be waived. Within the facility it is easy to run any type of copper or fiber optic physical connection, so there is no need to settle for installed lines with limited bandwidth just to get service.

Within the center, you generally have the option to get exactly the right type and quantity of bandwidth you need. This includes T1 or DS1, T3 or DS3, OC3, OC12, OC48 and higher SONET services. Also Ethernet from 10 Mbps through Gigabit Ethernet or even 10GigE. Many carriers can quickly and easily adjust the level of bandwidth they provider you on short notice. That's especially true of Ethernet services delivered on fiber optic cable.

So, who chooses colocation hosting rather than keeping everything within their own server rooms? Moving to a "colo" might actually cost you less per month that building, powering, cooling and staffing your own data center. In the case of businesses located outside of downtown metropolitan areas in major cities, especially those in rural areas, the cost of bandwidth may be much higher than in the carrier hotel. Out in the boonies, T1 connections may be all that is practical. It could easily make sense to use that T1 line to communicate with your server farm located within a distant colocation center. Chances are that neither your employees or customers can perceive that the servers running the online part of your business are 50 or 100 miles from your office and not located in the basement.

Does colocation hosting make sense for your business needs? Find out what options and pricing are available for your location with help from our team of voice and data experts. You may be surprised how much you can save by moving in with the carriers.

Oh, My Aching Internet Backbone

Bandwidth expansion is a sign of good business. As an Internet service provider or content provider, you see that once generous T1 pipe getting full to the limit. Now what? You wince a bit because revenues may not be accelerating at the same rate as bandwidth demand. Is there a way to ensure a solid dedicated connection to the Internet without going broke?

Today you have more cost competitive options than ever before. The standard upgrade path for ISPs and others with Internet backbone connections has been from T1 line to T3 line or DS3 over fiber, then OC3 SONET optical fiber, OC12, and on upward to OC48 bandwidth. You can still get all of these services at prices lower than ever before. But you now also have the options of Ethernet, Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet for your dedicated Internet connection. Let's take a look at what's currently available.

The most basic professional grade Internet connection is the T1 line at 1.5 Mbps. Some providers of free WiFi hotspots, such as restaurants, may get by with business DSL or a Cable Modem connection since the service is being offered on an "as available" basis at no charge to the patron. For everybody else, a T1 data line configured for dedicated Internet service is the opening ante.

If you fill up your T1 bandwidth, an incremental upgrade is to bond-in a second T1 to double the bandwidth. This process can be continued for 3x, 4x, 5x, and even 6x the original bandwidth. If you have a WISP (Wireless Internet Service Provider) tower in a rural area, T1 service over copper lines might be your only reasonable option. In metropolitan areas, you have a choice of staying with copper or moving up to fiber optic service.

T3 Internet runs at 45 Mbps and was originally designed for a coaxial cable physical layer. Today the same service is DS3 running on SONET metro fiber. T1, bonded T1, T3, and SONET fiber optic services are all based on TDM or Time Division Multiplexing. A protocol conversion is used to transport IP packets on TDM trunk lines. The last mile connection, or local loop, is almost always provided by the Incumbent Local Phone Company regardless of who supplies your Internet service port.

The native Ethernet connection is something fairly new. It is has come about primarily from competitive carriers with their own nationwide networks based on IP and not TDM, direct peering connections to the Internet, and local points of presence in metropolitan areas. XO communications is an example of a carrier that "lights" buildings for Ethernet fiber optic service in metro areas, bypassing the local phone companies completely. Check for Ethernet Lit Buildings in your area.

If you can get Ethernet, the cost savings can be substantial. A Fast Ethernet connection at 100 Mbps an easily be half the cost of a DS3 connection at 45 Mbps. The savings gets even better when you compare OC3, OC12, or OC48 to Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet.

What if you really need or want the cost savings of Ethernet but are nowhere near a carrier Point of Presence? Consider moving your equipment to "carrier hotel" or colocation facility. There you'll find multiple carriers offering a wide variety of standard and non-standard bandwidths at highly competitive prices. The construction costs are nil or minimal since you are in the same facility as the carrier's POP.

How much bandwidth can you get for the money? The answer depends on where you are located, where you might be willing to collocate, and how much of a bandwidth level and contract length you are willing to commit to. Don't spend a lot of time trying to run down these deals yourself. Let our team of expert bandwidth consultants review your needs and provide you with a suite of competitive options.