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.

Double Bonded T1 Cost and Alternatives

Companies are in love with their T1 service. They’ve had those lines for years and have become quite comfortable with the reliability and consistent performance you get from classic T1 lines. Eventually, though, the day comes with 1.5 Mbps just isn’t enough anymore. Does that mean bidding a fond farewell to the venerable T1 line?

No, it certainly doesn’t. If you are comfortable and happy with T1 as your business phone, dedicated Internet or private line connection, you can simply add another T1 and keep right on going. The trick is to order double bonded T1 service rather than a completely separate and unrelated T1 line. Bonding is an industry standard technique for combining the bandwidth of two line services so that they act as one larger service.

In this case, we are doubling the bandwidth by using 2 bonded T1 lines in place of a single line. Your bandwidth goes from 1.5 Mbps to 3 Mbps in both directions, upload and download. Everything else remains the same. This bonding is done within Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) that the service provider installs. It will likely be a T1 router with 2 T1 line inputs.

What happens when you reach the limit of 3 Mbps bandwidth? Is that the end of the road for T1? Not by a long shot. You can triple bond your T1 lines to up that to 4.5 Mbps or quadruple bond to get 6 Mbps. Five T1 lines gives 7.5 Mbps and Six lines offer 9 Mbps. Use 7 bonded T1 lines for 10.5 Mbps and 8 T1s for 12 Mbps. That’s about the practical limit for T1 line service. Beyond that, you’ll need to look at alternative technologies.

What’s the cost of bonded T1 lines? That’s easy to calculate. You simply take the cost of a single T1 line and multiple it by the number of lines you want to bond together. Unfortunately, with T1 technology there is no real economy of scale. Two lines cost twice as much as one line. However, you may wind up paying much less than twice the cost of your current T1 line.

Why? Because there is a lot of competition for these lines and chances are that prices have dropped since the last time you signed a service contract. Bonded T1 lines need to all come from the same provider. Your choice is to call up your current carrier and ask to have a second T1 line bonded to the one you have, or go out for competitive bids. A new service provider will install the bonded T1 lines you need on a new contract, probably for less than twice what you pay now. If you have very old T1 service and haven’t received any price reductions over the years, it is conceivable that you can get a double bonded T1 line for the same price as you pay now for a single line.

There’s another way you can get twice the bandwidth for the same price. That’s with a newer technology called EoC or Ethernet over Copper. EoC uses the same twisted pair telco wiring that provides your T1 lines. However it uses different terminal equipment at your location and at the far end installed in the telco central office.

One advantage of Ethernet over Copper is that you can get higher bandwidths than the 12 Mbps or so available using bonded T1. While 3 Mbps EoC is popular as an alternative to T1 lines or double bonded T1, many companies are moving up to 10 Mbps or even 15, 20, or 30 Mbps. EoC technology is distance sensitive, so the closer you are to the CO, the higher the bandwidth that can be installed. In business districts, it is not uncommon to get EoC service as high as 45 Mbps which competes with fiber delivered service.

Unsure as to which way to go? Why not take a look at both approaches and decide which makes the most sense for your business location or locations. Get pricing and bandwidth levels for both T1 lines and Ethernet over Copper services for a complete picture of available line services.

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.