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Posts Tagged ‘Co-location ’

Equipment colocation (aka co-location) is when an organization pays to rent space in another organization’s networked facility. It is a common practice for web hosting, as it allows a company to put their equipment into a controlled, reliable, networked environment without having to build or buy their own data center. If your company or other organization needs to be on the Web, colocation may be a good option – especially if you have special requirements such as non-standard equipment.

There are many reasons why colocation may make sense for you. One may be cost – by renting space in another company’s data center, you can simply move your equipment into that location and “plug it in” – the other company takes care of keeping it cooled and supplying it with power and internet access. One scenario in which this really makes sense is if your organization has a server already running on the premises, but is having problems keeping it online, and keeping it secure. By colocating that server to another company’s data center, all you need to do is unplug the server, drive it over to the new location and plug it in!

Another common reason for equipment co-location is to allow an organization to spread its online resources around geographically. This may be useful in terms of performance – by allowing equipment to help deal with traffic coming from that geographical area. It also can offer some redundancy in case of natural disaster. For example, you can be sure that large online companies like google do not have “all their eggs in one basket” but instead have data centers scattered all over the globe. Of course building facilities all over the place is not feasible for a lot of organizations – but by renting colocation space in a few data centers scattered around, your company could possible gain some benefit over concentrating everything in one location.