Colocation Services (Colo)

A Data centre is a secure, physical location at which computer hardware is stored. This may be operator-owned hardware or hardware managed on behalf of a cloud provider or private customers.

Data centres may contain rack cabinets, a cage of rack cabinets or a private room or suite.

They provide several core components to keep equipment running, including resilient power, cooling, fire protection and suppression and network connectivity to provide always-on access to hosted servers.

For more on this topic, visit our blog “What is Colocation?”

In the simplest terms, Colocation is when you place computer hardware which needs to be accessible at all times into a Data centre.

The Colocation service provider will ensure that your equipment is secure, powered up and kept at an optimal temperature. In some cases, they’ll also provide network connectivity to your equipment.

For more on this topic, visit our blog “What is Colocation?”

Not all Colocation providers are created equal and, depending on the facility, some may have a different "tier" rating.

Whilst these tiers aren’t governed by an official body or certification (and very few Data centres have been built to an approved tier-rated design), they’re terms thrown around in the industry which provide a basic understanding of the redundancy and tolerance of the overall facility.

The principle is that Data centre tiers run from tier 1 through to tier 4, with tier 1 being the most basic and tier 4 being the most fault-tolerant and redundant. (Tier 4 also includes armed guards, which only the most high security premises can boast in reality.)

For more on this topic, visit our blog “What is Colocation?”

PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) is a metric developed in 2007 by the Green Grid Association to boost energy efficiency in Data centres.

PUE aims to show how efficiently a Data centre is using energy with regard to computer equipment rather than the energy used by the infrastructure that maintains that equipment, such as cooling, ventilation, fire protection and security.

It’s calculated as a ratio of the total amount of energy consumed by the facility and the amount used by computer hardware only.

It matters because monitoring PUE can help Data centres to understand the impact of further measures to improve efficiency, by showing if those measures are having the desired effect and, over time, indicating if any systems or measures are failing.

For more on this topic, visit our blog “Can data centres be environmentally-friendly?”

A Committed Data Rate (CDR) is the amount of bandwidth you can expect to receive as a minimum on your connection.

It’s basically an amount of reserved throughput for your connection.

For example, with a CDR of 10Mbit you can expect to always receive a minimum throughput of 10Mbit on your connection.

For more on this topic, visit our blog “What’s a Committed Data Rate?”

Your CDR can be billed in a number of ways, one of which is at a 95th percentile.

This is the amount of bandwidth where, for 95% of the time, your usage is below this amount; similarly, for 5% of the time your usage is above this amount. This percentile is calculated over a period of time, such as the 95th percentile over the course of a month.

Bandwidth can be adjusted on demand but must be done in advance of the usage.

38/40 hours of burst up to "line rate" is allowable before it affects the CDR.

When bandwidth is stated as 1/10Gbit, the 1 means committed gigabits and the 10 indicates the burstable capacity. Many providers charge on the burst, unlike Safe Hosts.

For more on this topic, visit our blog “What’s a Committed Data Rate?”

On the 95^th percentile bit, might be worth stating 38/40 hours of burst up to “line rate” is allowable before it affects the CDR. Also maybe worth mentioning the 1/10Gbit means committed Gig and burstable up to 10. Many providers charge on the burst, but not us. Bandwidth can be adjusted on demand but must be done in advance of the usage.

Resilience, sometimes resiliency, is the ability of components in your technology ecosystem to recover and bounce back from a fault, so that the overall service being relied upon is wholly dependable.

Redundancy is when you have a duplicate set of components running in parallel with the first, providing a dependable backup should your core system fail for any reason.

You might hear terms such as N+1 or 2N. N+1 indicates redundancy; 2N is resilient. 2N+1 is resilient and redundant.

For more on this topic, visit our blog “Resilience and redundancy”, or click here for examples within our data centre.

Let’s just take a moment to consider. The multitude of hardware continually operating in a Data centre produces a serious amount of heat which internal fans push out into the air. Without some sort of cooling system in place, the Data centre would overheat, causing damage to customers’ hardware.

The idea with a hot aisle is that the hardware producing the heat is arranged so that the hot air is isolated from the cold aisle. The heat output is all directed in the same direction – into the hot aisle – where extractors can take that heat away altogether.

By arranging heat expelling hardware in a certain way, the opposite side becomes a “cold aisle” where the air is much cooler. The floor here is raised and underneath you’ll find a cooling system pushing cold air up through the floor to help manage the overall temperature.

Separating hot and cold air makes managing the environment much more efficient and cost-effective and contributes to a longer operating life for the hardware located there.

For organisations with limited IT resource, or even those with ample resource but big plans, remote hands, or smart hands as they’re sometimes called, are a way of saving time and money and concentrating internal resource on more value-add or business critical projects.

Especially when the task in question is as simple as flicking a couple of switches … hardly worth the time, expense and environmental impact of travelling.

For more on this topic, visit our blog “How remote hands are helping hosting customers to keep their distance”.

The cost of your Colocation service will be made up as the total of:

• Rack space taken (from single units to quarter, half or full cabinets)
• Power – costed by Amps required
• Bandwidth – costed by speed and capacity required
• IPs – costed by the number of IP addresses required
• Remote hands support (note, until further notice, Safe Hosts is providing remote hands and rack and stack free of charge, due to the pandemic

For more information on costs for Colocation, visit our Colocation page.

At Safe Hosts, we’re flexible to your needs and we know one size doesn’t fit everyone.

Therefore, we offer single units of Colocation in addition to the more traditional quarter racks (10 units), half racks (21 units) and full racks (42 units) measuring 600mm x 1000mm.

Our full racks are provided in a private cabinet for your hardware alone, while our single units and quarter/half racks come in shared cabinets.

For more information on our rack space specifications, visit our Colocation page.

Yes, we can adjust your bandwidth on a monthly basis to meet your business needs at any given time. As a customer, all you need to do is raise a ticket in your customer portal and we’ll do the rest.

With Managed Colocation, the service provider actively manages your hosted hardware for you, saving you the time, effort and cost of maintaining it yourself.

Depending on the level of management, they might take care of your operating system, applications and databases as well as the security and backups.

For more on the benefits of Managed Colocation, visit our blog “Taking Colocation to the next level”.

The colocation environment is purpose-built to house IT infrastructure, providing financial and environmental benefits, reducing costs and providing a more efficient use of IT infrastructure.

Bandwidth can be a huge cost and it may not be economical to run your own server facility when compared to a Data centre which has multiple redundant links and equipment.

The electricity in a colocation facility is likely 'cleaner' than you’d typically find in an office or home. This 'clean' electricity gives benefits to your equipment, resulting in a longer life.

Locating your infrastructure off-site means you’re able to continue operating in the event of outages or other issues. Employees can still access systems and do their jobs, while customers can still access websites and place orders. Tier 3 and Tier 4 facilities are redundant by design to keep your systems online in the event of a catastrophe, whereas creating and maintaining such an infrastructure at your office would require considerable time, effort and funding.

For more on this topic, visit our blogs “What is Colocation?” and “Colocation vs on-premise”.

With Colocation, you know exactly where your data is held and who has access. With cloud services, you're not party to how secure the machines are where your private data is being held.

When you choose Colocation, you own the physical hardware and are, therefore, only limited by the functionality of your own hardware. On the other hand, with cloud services, if you wanted more RAM in a machine it’s highly likely to result in increased monthly costs.

Cloud services are typically pre-configured for the most common use cases, almost a one-size-fits-all approach. Whereas when you colocate with your own hardware, you have complete freedom to configure as per your business requirements, saving both time and money on initial setup costs.

At Safe Hosts, we're exploring a hybrid cloud concept, where we manage your server estate in different locations - and the networks between them all. It's a best-of-both-worlds solution as you still own the hardware, you know where it is and who has access to it.

For more on this topic, visit our blogs “What is Colocation?” and "Cloud, Colo and Control".