Data Center and Colocation
Colocation
Colocation is renting space, power and cooling in a professional data center for servers and network gear that you own. The building supplies what an office server room cannot: backup power, industrial cooling, guarded access and a choice of network carriers. You keep control of the equipment and everything that runs on it.
- 63 companies on the shelf
- Coverage
Buyer's checklist
Eight questions that decide this purchase
Think these through before you buy. Answer what you can and your quote comes back faster. Skip what you cannot, and we will work through it with you.
- 01
How much space do you need on day one and in three years: part of a rack, a full cabinet, a cage or a private suite?
- 02
How many kilowatts does each rack draw today, and what will it draw after the next hardware refresh? Electrical code holds continuous draw to about 80 percent of a circuit's rating, so usable power is less than the number on the order.
- 03
Do you need the whole power path built twice (2N), or is one spare component (N+1) enough? If you take a single feed to save money, does the uptime commitment still cover you?
- 04
Which carriers and which cloud on-ramps must already be in the building, and do you need two physically separate fiber paths into it?
- 05
Which audited standards must the facility itself hold, such as HIPAA, PCI, SOC 2, ISO 27001, FedRAMP or CMMC?
- 06
Who will rack, cable and later touch the equipment: your own staff driving to the site, or the facility's on-site technicians, usually sold as remote hands?
- 07
Is power billed on what you actually draw or as a reserved block, and which suits how steady your load is?
- 08
Does the exact format you need, whether a cage, a suite, staging space or high density, exist at the specific site you would use? A provider's footprint is wider than any one building.
No company matches every box you checked
That usually means the combination is rare, not impossible. Clear a filter, or add the service and we will go find who can do it.
Capabilities come from published supplier material. We confirm them for your addresses before anything is quoted.
More on what it is
Space is sold in steps. The smallest is part of a shared rack. Next comes a full locking cabinet, then a fenced cage inside a shared hall, then a walled suite that is yours alone. Very large deployments get a hall engineered around them.
Power matters more than floor space. A data center is planned and billed by the kilowatt each rack draws, and power usually reaches your cabinet as two separate feeds, called A and B, so equipment with two power supplies keeps running if one feed is lost. You will hear two shorthand terms for how much backup sits behind those feeds. N+1 means one spare component beyond what the load needs. 2N means the whole power path is built twice.
The network is the other half of the value. A carrier-neutral building lets you choose among many carriers instead of the one that happens to serve your office. In the meet-me room, a short cable called a cross-connect links your cabinet straight to a carrier, to another tenant, or to a private on-ramp into a public cloud, without crossing the open internet.
Colocation and cloud get confused. In the cloud you rent someone else's computers. In colocation you own the computers and rent the building. Many companies do both, and some keep steady workloads on their own hardware next to a private cloud or a public cloud footprint.
Who needs it
- You own servers or storage you plan to keep, and you do not want to run a building for them.
- Your server room is out of space, power or cooling, and the landlord is not going to change that.
- You need a second site for disaster recovery that is far enough away to survive what takes out the first one. See Backup and Disaster Recovery.
- You work in financial services, healthcare, education or local government, and the facility itself has to carry audited controls.
- You run AI, GPU or other high-performance computing that draws far more power per rack than an office or a standard cabinet can deliver.
- You need computing close to users in another metro or another country and have no reason to build there.
You can probably skip colocation if everything you run is already delivered as software or sits in a public cloud, and you own no hardware you intend to keep.
Signs you need it
- Your current colocation contract is ending and you have to renew, renegotiate or move.
- The room runs hot, the battery backup is at its limit, or a tripped breaker has already taken production down.
- An audit asks who can physically reach your servers, and the honest answer is anyone with a key to the office.
- A disaster recovery site has to be built, moved or shut down.
- A new AI or GPU project needs more power per rack than your current space can supply.
- You are opening in a new region and the applications feel slow from there.
How IT Raven helps
Add colocation to your quote list and tell us what you are housing, how much power it draws and where it needs to be. A person takes that to the data center operators in our 500+ partner network and comes back with the buildings that fit and the ones that do not, with reasons. That includes the details a brochure leaves out: which carriers are really in the meet-me room at that address, which cloud on-ramps are live there, whether the cage or the power density you need exists at that site, and how the uptime commitment changes with the power design you choose.
We line the proposals up so that space, power, cross-connects and remote hands are compared on the same terms. Then we stay on one thread through the contract, the install dates and move-in. If you need circuits into the building, we quote Business Connectivity at the same time, so the network is not the thing that runs late.
After move-in the same team handles added power, new cross-connects, trouble tickets and the next renewal.
How buying works
The store is the easy part. Staying on the account is the job.
Anyone can show you logos. The reason to buy here is what happens on install night, and on the ticket you open nine months later.
- 01
Build your quote list
Add services and companies as you shop. No form stands between you and the shelf.
- 02
We bring back real options
A person shops the bench against your addresses, then walks you through what fits and what does not.
- 03
We handle the order and install
Paperwork, site survey, install dates, cutover night. You get one thread, not five vendors.
- 04
We stay on your account
Same team for moves, adds, tickets and the next renewal. That is the part everyone else drops.