Colocation services, commonly referred to as "colo" as they provide a safe environment for hardware and network communication, enable businesses to interact with clients globally. A colocation provider frequently provides the space, cooling, electricity, bandwidth, and physical security, while the user supplies the servers. The terms rooms, cabinets, racks, and cages are used to describe the capacity of a facility.

 

A colocation center, sometimes referred to as a "carrier hotel" or colocation facility, is a kind of data center where retail clients can rent hardware, space, and bandwidth.

 

With a minimal amount of expense and complexity, colocation facilities link servers, storage, networking hardware, and other corporate equipment to a range of telecommunications and network service providers. In addition, they provide energy, space, cooling, and physical security.

 

Instead of keeping their servers or computer gear in-house or in a private data center, businesses can rent physical space for them and store them in a third-party data center. The supplier of the data center has the responsibility for essential elements including cooling, energy, and network connectivity.

 

Companies that employ colocation services purchase their hardware and pay the colocation operator for the resources and data center space. After that, the person is responsible for future maintenance as well as server configuration and setup.

 

The customer has to have their physical server before they can set up a colocation hosting arrangement. Instead of renting a server from the hosting company, the customer is leasing space, just like they would at a rental storage facility. The client delivers the server to the colocation hosting provider's location, which is frequently a data center. Although the customer just leases space from the data center or colocation site, all the server's hardware and software settings are still owned and under their control. Through communication with the colocation hosting provider's personnel, the customer may effortlessly scale up or down services like bandwidth and Rackspace to suit their specific business requirements.

 

Because they desire the freedom to manage their equipment, many businesses would rather outsource than host their IT infrastructure internally. Although it is readily scaled up as the firm expands, space is hired according to their needs.

 

Common Features of Colocation 

Facilities. Colocation allows for the possible storage of your IT equipment in the provider's data center. For your equipment, these facilities provide cabinets, cable trays, and racks. They are often assessed for reliability.

 

Strength. Colocation data centers typically include uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) or battery backup systems in addition to backup generators with varying degrees of redundancy, depending on the location.

 

Tangible protections. With features like biometric authentication, round-the-clock surveillance, and on-site security personnel, the majority of colocation facilities provide robust physical security measures.

Cooling. Duplicate HVAC systems and chiller designs—such as water loop pumps, cooling towers, and centrifugal chillers—are frequently included in colocation services to protect your hardware.