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Are you considering colocation? It’s not easy to find balanced information on the topic because the top search rankings are dominated by companies pitching their own colocation services. There are three primary questions you need to answer to be able to confidently choose colocation:
- Who will manage the equipment?
- Where will it be stored?
- What will your equipment be?
Let’s look at each of these different aspects to get a better sense of the overall colocation experience.
Who: Managing your own colocated servers
First of all, with colocation you will need a system administrator to manage the server. That person will also need to have all the necessary tools to be able to run the server. According to Ranjit Nayak of Cisco, the primary responsibilities of server management fall into two general categories: configuration and monitoring. However, keep in mind that managing a server is actually a cycle consisting of the following five components:
- server configuration
- server monitoring
- problem detection
- analysis
- determination of changes needed.
Essentially, the main role of a system administrator managing your colocated servers is to conduct each of those tasks repeatedly. Both the configuration and monitoring phases are somewhat different depending on the type of server. Since virtual servers are generally outside the realm of colocation and since application servers have their own challenges, we won’t get into the differences for system administration but will instead focus (in brief) on physical servers.
Configuration
When configuring your server with consideration of your overall infrastructure, basic categories of concern to the sysadmin are firmware, the network, and power.
Monitoring
When monitoring the colocated servers, your sysadmin will be paying attention to such parameters as availability, feedback, and failures of two basic types: network transmit and power.
Where: Storing your colocated servers
Storage sounds initially like it is just about space requirements. However, as Michael Potts points out in Data Center Knowledge, colocation is not as easy as looking at costs for set amounts of square footage. In fact, your colocation service should be determined largely by the amount of electrical power and cooling that your equipment will need.
Potts notes that you should in fact not focus on space as much as you focus on power, because colocation clients are more likely to run into power limitations first. It’s best to address this problem upfront: rather than thinking of your colocation requirements in terms of a physical area, think primarily of power and cooling. The advantage to this approach is that you can find a more cost-effective solution with minimal vulnerability based on a more strategized approach toward capacity.
Potts references a SunGard white paper based on the power-over-space thesis that explores the issue in detail.
What: Choosing or building your colocated servers
Figuring out your equipment is the other major challenge. More is at stake with colocation than with traditional hosting because the equipment belongs to you. Your servers become an investment, so you want your selections to be correct. Matthew Mombrea of IT world discusses the basic options: “out-of-the-box” solutions versus the DIY route of building your own server.
Out-of-the-box – There are two basic solutions as far as prebuilt servers go, says Mombrea. You can put money aside as a factor and choose a major brand such as HP or Dell, so that you know your server is mainstream and attached to relatively strong support. If you need a more economical route, you can buy from an organization such as Pogo Linux, which will configure the server for you also for a fee. Whatever “out-of-the-box” company you choose, you don’t have to figure out each of the individual pieces of the server, which is nice if that’s not your expertise.
Build your own – In this case, you construct the server yourself. Mombrea warns that it is easy to make mistakes with this avenue. A typical problem you might run into is ordering pieces that aren’t compatible with each other, whether technologically or physically.
Servers come in all different formulations, but the basic elements you will need for your server are below. In addition to these items, you will also want a RAID controller if you want to use a RAID system for storage.
- Hard drive
- CPU
- RAM
- Motherboard
- Chassis.
Taking the next step
If you have a general sense of the answers to the above questions, you will have a much better sense of what you need to set up your colocation service the right way. One other primary question is what datacenter you should choose. We offer colocation at Atlantic.net, and one of the areas in which we excel is that we are not “one size fits all.” Instead, we help customers with all their concerns and customize solutions designed to meet individual business needs.
By Brett Haines; comic words by Kent Roberts and art by Leena Cruz.