Known simply as colo, colocation in data centres refers to the services provided by companies offering shared, secured spaces for corporate businesses to store equipment related to data storage and other hardware.
Colocation is the practice of renting space for servers and equipment in a data centres outside facilities. Colocation facilities provide space, power, cooling, and physical security to servers, storage, and networking equipment from other companies, as well as connecting them to various telecoms and networking providers at minimal cost and difficulty.
Colocation facilities offer customers various options to store their equipment. Colocation facilities provide servers cooling systems, electricity, and communications systems which provide a continuous connection. Colocation facilities almost always offer technical support services on-site.
Equipment in a robust facility is sometimes distributed, requiring frequent staffing and checks as well. Colocation centres provide electricity, cooling, and network connectivity, but the tenants are responsible for providing their own equipment, such as servers, storage, and supporting infrastructure.
Colocation services provide networking, redundant power and cooling components, physical security, and the building that houses everything. Colocation services enable customers to arrange their finances around predictable hosting bills. Most colocation services that are geared toward users are capable of taking existing server infrastructure and information, and moving it all into the data centres of new providers.
Because colocation requires a certain level of know-how to be successful, many businesses that do not have dedicated IT departments prefer to migrate their IT infrastructure into dedicated server solutions using managed services rather than relying on colocation.
Moving from dedicated hosting can lower the cost of capital, but when overlooked, colocation can cost more. Which is why choosing the right colocation provider is extremely important to the company. Moving their servers into data centres Sydney wide and colocation can be crucial so choosing the right one is important.
Generally, colocation hosting enhances the operations of the business, lowers the capital costs, and increases the quality of the services customers receive. Colocation hosts also have the benefit of providing flexible resources, which customers can scale up or down according to their needs, without having to make repeated capital investments.
This way, they get to enjoy the benefits of hosting services in a colocation environment, like cooling systems for servers, reliable electricity, hardware and software maintenance, data backup, climate control, and energy, and increased Internet bandwidth.
In colocation hosting, companies own their hardware, but seek to extend its usefulness by renting space for servers at a data centre, which provides benefits such as increased Internet bandwidth, server cooling systems and climate control, and reliable power.
Colocation hosting is one kind of service that data centres provide, where they rent out space and provide a home to servers. Colocation is the process by which a third party houses private servers and networking gear at a data centre that is located outside of an organizations premises (as opposed to the on-premises scenario, where servers reside within one room or part of the organizations building). In other words, collocation is a robust data centre facility in which companies purchase space to house their servers for others.
The client physically moves the servers to the collocation hosting providers location, usually a data centre. The customer does not lease a server to the hosting provider; instead, the customer simply rents space, just as he or she would with a storage company that rents storage. You are not renting a server from the hosting colocation facility, they are merely leasing space to you in their data centres, and providing additional services.
The colocation provider provides you with a space in a data closet in the data centres of the colocation providers, electricity for your hardware, IP addresses for your use (or crossconnects with dedicated carriers if you are bringing in your own bandwidth), and a port for uplinks for connecting your hardware to their network, leading to the Internet.
Typically, hosting companies provide on-site support and optional managed networking services to enhance the business security and connectivity. A Colocation Centre (also written as Colocation, or Coloco) or Carrier Hotel is a data centre type of facility that offers hardware, space, and bandwidth to be leased by commercial customers.
