When you’re evaluating possible colocation providers, the sheer amount of information can be overwhelming. However, there are distinct characteristics of the physical building, security, network and more that you must consider.

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Data Center 101: What to Look for
in a Colocation Provider

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3. Considering Your Critical Resources
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4. • Building type
• UPS power
• Data center cooling
• Fire suppression
• Physical security
• Network
• Customer service
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Data Center Critical Resources

5. • Building use
• Single tenant or multi-occupancy
• Potential conflicting tenant use
• Building location
• Flood plain
• Flight path
• Rail lines, etc.
• Building type
• Steel girder and deck
• Concrete slab and column
• Concrete tilt-up
Building Type

6. • UPS power (uninterruptable power
supply)
• Provides conditioned power to customer
cabinets and is backed up by onsite
generators
• N single threaded architecture
• N+1 fault tolerant architecture
• A/B fault tolerant architecture
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UPS Power

9. • Provides a stable, conditioned climate
for data center environment
• Controls humidity and static discharge
• Filters the supply air to remove
particulates
• Maintains recommended internal
operating temperatures for servers
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Data Center Cooling

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• Provides protection for infrastructure
and customer equipment against
smoke and fire; using several methods
• Pre-action Dry-pipe Sprinkler
• VESDA (Very Early Smoke Detection)
• Photo Electric Detection Grid
Data Center Fire Suppression

11. • Compliance
• HIPAA, PCI DS and SOC (formerly SAS 70)
• Controlled access with assigned ID cards
and biometric scanning
• Onsite NOC to qualify and control vendor
and visitor traffic
• Camera coverage of sensitive data center
areas with long-term video retention
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Physical Security

12. • Carrier neutrality
• Allow for blended bandwidth and point-to-point customer
options
• Multiple carriers
• Provides redundant backbone access and fault tolerance
bandwidth management
• Divergent entrance points
• Multiple fiber paths to MPOE providing physical fault
tolerance
• Redundant switching layer
• Providing logical and physical fault tolerance at the
distribution layer
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Network

13. • 24/7 onsite staff
• Remote hands customer assistance
• Eyes and ears in the data center
• 24/7 customer and vendor access
• No appointment requirement using assigned access credentials
• Controlled and qualified vendor service visits on your behalf
• 24/7 support call center
• Ability to open and address customer service request anytime
• Online customer portal
• Create service tickets
• Real-time visibility into your solution
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Customer Service

14. Key Questions
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15. • How much power can you provide my
solution?
• What is your design density?
• How are you delivering power to my
solution?
• Do you use redundant circuit distribution?
• What has been your uptime for the past
12 months?
• What is your SLA?
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Be Sure to Ask…

16. • What are your maintenance protocols?
• PM frequency, maintenance windows,
advanced customer notice
• What is your future expansion path for
the data center
• Can you support my growth?
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Be Sure to Ask…

17. Q&A
Rada Flom | HOSTING Sr. Director of Data Center Operations
For more information about colocation by HOSTING, please contact our team
at 888.894.4678.
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