(January 22, 2024) Power, cooling, hardware, software, staffing — these are just some of the expenses involved with operating an on-premises data center. It’s no wonder organizations are looking to conserve capital by shifting more of their workloads to the public cloud.
However, the cloud isn’t always the best choice. Most organizations have some workloads they’d like to keep on privately owned systems for security and compliance reasons.
The benefits of colocation infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offers an alternative. Like the public cloud, colocation IaaS provides on-demand access to IT infrastructure. However, it also provides other business and IT benefits, including more options, greater control, and bundled managed services.
What Is Colocation?
In a typical colocation arrangement, organizations rent space in a third-party provider’s data center for their servers, storage, and other computing hardware. Colocation services include power, cooling, physical security, and connections to various telecommunications and network service providers. Redundant resources provide greater reliability than the typical organization’s data center.
Colocation providers often monitor power usage, data traffic, device performance, and more, generating email alerts if necessary. They will also monitor IT assets as well as electrical, mechanical, and environmental systems.
In addition, providers frequently offer “remote hands” services for basic tasks such as rebooting a server, reconnecting cables, or responding to alerts. “Smart hands” services are available for more complex tasks such as server provisioning, configuration changes, and circuit testing.
What Is Colocation IaaS?
Colocation IaaS goes a step further. With colocation IaaS, organizations rent access to servers and other IT infrastructure to support their workloads. They don’t have to buy this equipment and keep it up to date. In many cases, additional infrastructure can be spun up quickly to meet changing needs, providing cloud-like flexibility and scalability.
Many colocation IaaS services are delivered by managed services providers who have built their own data center facilities. In addition to delivering the traditional colocation service offerings, these providers assume responsibility for most administrative and management functions. Managed services further blur the line between colocation and the public cloud. Colocation IaaS can provide greater simplicity because it eliminates the need to learn how to manage a cloud platform.
What Are the Benefits of Colocation IaaS?
Provisioning public cloud services can be as easy as clicking a few buttons and providing a credit card number. Why would an organization choose colocation IaaS instead?
The primary reason is greater control over the physical infrastructure. In a public cloud environment, multiple customers share all the resources in a virtual server that could be anywhere in the world. Colocation IaaS gives organizations the option to host their workloads on virtual private servers (VPSs). VPS hosting gives each customer dedicated resources on a server with multiple users.
Virtualization technology is used to create partitions between multiple virtual servers. While all the virtual servers share a hypervisor and underlying hardware, each VPS runs its operating system and software and reserves its share of server resources.
Some colocation IaaS arrangements also enable customers to provision bare-metal servers. This provides more configuration options and gives the customer total control over the physical server.
Conclusion
The cloud isn’t suitable for some workloads, but most workloads benefit from connectivity with the organization’s cloud resources. Colocation facilities provide connectivity to any cloud with minimal latency. This “cloud-adjacent” infrastructure eliminates the capital expense of building and maintaining a data center while providing a secure, stable, and scalable environment for production workloads.
Mainstream offers flexible hosting solutions, including traditional colocation and IaaS, in our SSAE-16-compliant facilities. Contact us to learn more about these cost-effective data center services.
ABOUT MAINSTREAM TECHNOLOGIES
Mainstream Technologies delivers a full range of technology services in Arkansas and the surrounding region including managed technology services and consulting, custom software development, and cybersecurity services. We also offer industry-leading data center services in our Little Rock facilities. Established in 1996, Mainstream has earned a reputation for delivering quality, reliable, and professional technology services for public and private-sector customers across the United States.
Jeff Pracht
IT Business Development Manager
(479) 715-8629 Office
(501) 529-0008 Mobile
