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

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Housekeeping

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#HOSTINGspeaks and @HOSTINGdotcom

Considering Your Critical Resources

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• Building type

• UPS power

• Data center cooling

• Fire suppression

• Physical security

• Network

• Customer service

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Data Center Critical Resources

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

Key Questions

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• 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…

• 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…

Q&ARada 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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