- The Difference Between Data Centres and Colocation Facilities
- What Data Centres Are Used For
- What Colocation Facilities Are Used For
- Is It Time for a Change?
The buzz around most commercial IT conversations over the last few years has been around what we can do virtually. But as exciting as the hubbub of innovation can be, let’s not forget that without servers, users wouldn’t be able to connect to the internet, access programs, or even reach their files.
SMEs and blue-chip businesses face an important choice when deciding on the IT infrastructure that’s right for them: colocation vs data centres to enable cloud connections and digital transformation.
Now, on-premise servers are pretty straightforward to explain – they’re a group of onsite servers that you privately own and control. Simple, right? But what of data centres compared to colocation services? What are they?
The Difference Between Data Centres and Colocation Facilities
Colocation vs data centres in short, is that a data centre is a place and colocation is a service.
A data centre is a facility used to house servers, computer or storage systems and network communications. Private and public cloud platforms are deployed from data centres, but you may not know where these facilities are, and certainly won’t have access to them.
Data centres generally feature redundant or backup power supplies, environmental controls (like air conditioning) and security devices. They are classified by tiers ranging from I to IV.
When comparing colocation vs data centres, you’ll see that colocation is a service delivered by a data centre. This allows a business’ owned hardware to be deployed from the facility, taking advantage of faster cloud connections and high availability and redundancy. Read more about how colocation works and its benefits in our complete guide.
What Data Centres Are Used For?
Meeting sustainability obligations is one challenge, but proving action and results is another.
Data centres are used for the hosting and deployment of IT infrastructure, including critical applications and data. Their main purpose is to store and process data, enabling networks, organisations and wider connected infrastructure to function.
For example, Node4’s proprietary private and managed public cloud services are delivered via the same data centres as our colocation services. How an organisation chooses to benefit from our infrastructure is a choice they make based on their IT and business requirements.
The vast majority of businesses will find that a colocation service is more cost-effective, operationally resilient and scalable than maintaining their own on-premises infrastructure. Though the opposite is often true for the largest of operations, who may have a privately owned and managed data centre of their own.
This is because colocation becomes more expensive than managing a private data centre after 80+ racks of hardware are required. However, as server hardware becomes smarter, it becomes smaller, so more businesses are expected to begin switching to colocation services for their mission-critical or sensitive IT operations.
What Colocation Facilities Are Used For
The difference between colocation and data centres is that colocation is a service delivered via data centres, where customers (called tenants in this context) can deploy their own servers from a data centre facility.
Colocation facilities are typically highly certified, compliance audited and with exceptional energy consumption credentials. A colocation data centre allows service users to access the redundancy, resiliency and innovation advantages of large data centres, while retaining complete ownership and control over servers and the mission-critical functions they perform. Read more about the service you can expect from colocation providers.
Benefits include:
- Enhanced resiliency
- Highest availability
- Rapid scalability
- Agility
- Robust security
- Tight regulatory management
- Budget efficiency
It’s often considered a steppingstone between on-premises server deployment and a migration to a hybrid cloud model – the first big leap on a typical digital transformation journey.
If you’re using on-premises equipment, think about your company’s growth trajectory or ambitions for the next five years. Ask yourself:
- Do you have enough physical server space for your growing business?
- What if you have to securely manage with thousands of extra transactions daily?
- Do you rent out larger commercial premises at great expense to the business?
- Could you save on rent, energy consumption and redundancy measures by placing critical hardware into a colocation facility?
In addition to streamlining budget and moving toward an opex model, colocation can also help organisations achieve demonstrable steps in their sustainability agendas. Data centres providing colocation services typically have excellent energy consumption and efficiency performance, which of course contribute to your big-picture sustainability footprint.
Is It Time for a Change?
If you’ve outgrown your current in-house infrastructure, want to safeguard important data, have peace of mind that your physical facilities are protected and all issues will be troubleshooted immediately, your need only choose a colocation service.
Interested in learning more? Get in touch with Node4 today.