We’re starting to see a bit of an interesting dynamic when it comes to increasing bandwidth connectivity and cloud services with our clients here in New England. Larger (and less expensive) bandwidth links are helping businesses move to more cloud services, however there are still a number of servers and services that companies like to maintain first hand control over. Now, on the flip side of that coin, bandwidth costs may be lower than in the past, but electricity and ancillary costs are on the rise, making the prospect of maintaining local servers a costly proposition still.
Virtualization has helped many companies reduce their physical server footprint, as well as bring down some of those power and cooling costs. However, there’s still a good amount of time and money that needs to be invested in maintaining a number of local servers, as well as ensuring uptime and available bandwidth to support client traffic to those servers.
Our datacenter in the Foundry Complex in Providence, RI helps companies who still need to maintain a number of services directly place them in a secure, robust environment while providing the uptime and bandwidth they need for smooth operations. We’ve found that many applications and services use an ever-increasing amount of bandwidth, and often times it can be costly for businesses to make sure they have enough speed at their offices to share the server traffic along with regular company Internet use. By placing their servers in our data center, the companies can be assured that their servers will have plenty of available bandwidth while reducing the strain on their local network and connections.
Having their servers in our datacenter also helps companies control their local power and environmental costs as well, since they’re not paying to power all those machines nor are they having to keep them cooled. Their colocation costs contain all of those services, which helps reduce their IT overhead on a monthly basis while providing more service than they would get if hosting those servers locally.
Of course, we’ve talked before about the weather impact on services here in New England as well. Just in the past 12 months we’ve seen both a hurricane and a blizzard that brought down infrastructure throughout the region, and left many businesses without power or Internet for days at a time. Any company that relies on traffic to their servers to generate revenue simply can’t afford to have that kind of lengthy outage, and colocating their servers in our datacenter helps avoid any major revenue loss due to severe weather.
Every company has different needs, and we completely understand that. To help out, our datacenter in Providence can provide colocation to a 1U server, or to a half of a rack’s worth of servers, all the way up through a custom configured cage. With unlimited 24×7 keycard access to our datacenter, customers can perform hands-on work to their hardware any time they need to, and it’s location just off of Route 95 can accommodate businesses located everywhere from Boston through Cape Cod through northern Connecticut.
If your business maintains a number of servers onsite, it’s definitely worthwhile to investigate the aspect of colocation – the reduced costs and increased services can provide immediate dividends to nearly any type or size of business. By researching your current needs with an eye on future growth and increased bandwidth and power, colocating your servers might make a much better (and cost effective) option for your business.
