How To Choose A Datacenter

There are a variety of reasons why companies, large and small, start looking a data center to house their network infrastructure.  Hopefully it’s not because your servers are sweating to death in small closed off closet in your office but rather because you’ve out grown your existing server room, the economy has been good to you, and it’s just time to move on!

Key Criteria Consideration

So how do you go about searching for a good data center and what do you look for?  In general, there are several key criteria that I consider to be very important when deciding on a good data center fit for a company:

• Location, location, location – does your company have the budget to accommodate the expense of traveling, such as parking, etc.  to and from the data center when an engineer needs to do maintenance or any other support?
• Other Building Tenants – it’s always preferred to choose a data center that is located in its own isolated building otherwise, you risk being inconvenienced or even denied physical access to your network infrastructure if another tenant in the same building has invoked some sort of building emergency such as a fire or utility outage.
• Cost – I found that data centers that have higher standards such as high security, cooling and power infrastructure, redundant blended networks, humidification, AC & DC power capabilities, and 24x7x365 on-site support staff generally have comparable pricing.  Remember, you typically get what you pay for so if the cost is really cheap it probably is a less than favorable place to have your company’s intellectual property.
• Change requests and availability – you need to ask how  long it takes a data center staff to prepare for you to move into your new rack space and how fast it would take them to make any required infrastructure changes that may be needed for growth on such items  as additional electrical circuits or telephony.  Some data centers can turn around request within 24 – 48 hours and some require 2 – 3 weeks to complete your request.
• Security – not all data center are equal and your company may have specific security requirements by law that must be met.  So check to see if the data center you are considering will meet all required security compliances such as SAS 70, SAS 70 Type II, and PCI compliances.

Tier Level Definitions

Another sales term that you will hear when shopping around for your data center is the “tier level”.   Most people don’t know exactly what this means and yet it is so important when trying to decide on which data center to choose. Tier 1 means that there is minimal site redundancy to resources of a data center where Tier 4 would provide the highest level of site redundancy.  I find that the cost difference between Tier 1 data centers and Tier 4 is minimal and worth pursuing a Tier 4 data center whenever possible.

• Tier 1: composed of a single path for power and cooling distribution, without redundant components, providing 99.671% availability.
• Tier II: composed of a single path for power and cooling distribution, with redundant components, providing 99.741% availability
• Tier III: composed of multiple active power and cooling distribution paths, but only one path active, has redundant components, and is concurrently maintainable, providing 99.982% availability
• Tier IV: composed of multiple active power and cooling distribution paths, has redundant components, and is fault tolerant, providing 99.995% availability.

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