Server housing or colocation has long been a real alternative to operating servers in your own server room. Without having to make large investments, you get a powerful IT infrastructure provided here. Not only savings in the area of energy supply and air conditioning often speak for an outsourcing of the own hardware. The company's increased security needs can also be a reason for moving its servers.
As with any IT project, thorough planning is important before moving your servers. Therefore, carefully analyze your company processes to identify potential obstacles to outsourcing your servers at an early stage. For example, if you work with a non-browser-based client-server application, the required VPN connection between your company and the data center where your servers will be located in the future may cause performance problems. However, if they are servers that perform their work mainly in the background without much interaction (mail servers, encryption gateways, web servers, etc.), outsourcing can be of great benefit. Also the operation of terminal server solutions in a data center is mostly associated with many advantages.
.As a rule, the data center (as with almost every provider) has a broadband connection with a direct Internet backbone connection. This results in lower latencies than with the Internet connection in the company, which can have a positive effect on applications used remotely. For example, in the case of server services that are to be available around the clock in remote offices (home office, branch offices, etc.), this is particularly evident due to the faster connection and higher availability.
Just like in your own server room, you also have continuous access to the data center in which your servers are located. This access is secured multiple times, so that only those people who are actually allowed to access your systems can do so. Seamless documentation of all visits to the data center is, of course, ensured.
The price of the service depends on three requirements.
How many height units (HE) do you need in the rack? Are multiple racks required or is one whole rack enough? The less space you need, the cheaper it will be. Keep in mind that tower servers typically take up more space than rack-optimized servers. In your space calculations, you can usually save on the space needed for an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS), since the data centers themselves are fused.
The electricity is billed according to expenditure. Higher power consumption is therefore also associated with higher costs. With server virtualization, you can save power and space at the same time. In addition, the waste heat generated by the systems in the rack is directly related to the energy consumed. If the power requirements of those devices in the rack exceed a predefined threshold, an additional rack may need to be booked for more devices to ensure the air conditioning of the IT infrastructure and equipment.
In addition to power and space requirements, the third cost factor is the required Internet connection. The bandwidth with which your systems are connected to the Internet backbone and the required monthly traffic are decisive here. How much bandwidth do you need? Is 1 GBit/s or less sufficient? Do you need a flat rate or is a volume package sufficient? Although the Internet connection in the data center is significantly cheaper than connecting the company via the Internet provider, there is definitely potential for savings when selecting the appropriate billing model.
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