Colocation America Blog

The forecast is out on IT trends for 2012. Staying ahead of the game is, of course, the main concern for many businesses. One trend that keeps everyone blogging is the increase of exchanging of data and information online. As society changes so must companies and the way in which they conduct business even for financial companies. The ease in which companies exchange information has led to an increase of deals. To stay in the loop, exchange data and maintain uptime at any hour, companies will have to find the cheapest dedicated servers close to home.

For financial companies on Wall Street a data center close to the company's headquarters matters. A second in the world of low-latency trading can seem like an eternity. Imagine Wall Street having a data center in San Francisco opposed to Weehawken; the microseconds wasted to connect to an exchange systems to execute a trade may be the difference between millions of dollars made or lost.  For those who do not know Weehawken is home to five major exchange companies' IT infrastructures including the American Stock Exchange, Philadelphia Stock Exchange, and BATS Trading. The increase in bandwidth has allowed finance companies to reach more clients quicker resulting in more sells. For a finance business or any other business type in Weehawken or the surrounding areas, choosing a Colocation Weehawken provider or data center may be the difference between making it, breaking it, or just surviving.

As the New Year starts on a high note for some, and a low note for others, one thing is for certain, 'green' is in. However, figuring out what green really means is a whole new problem. For the IT world, the word 'green' has been thrown around so many times, the facts have been lost. Especially for companies that sole business revolves around data centers, the word 'green' may cause fear.

Companies are concerned with the cost of servers and data centers rather than the 'green' side. Companies have many choices. For companies that experience high volumes of traffic to their site, they even have choices on which type of dedicated server to choose from. Weather it is a Linux or Windows, most companies just want the cheapest dedicated server. For the few companies that want green and cheap they find themselves in the middle of a complex Venn diagram with renewable energy data centers being the clear option. To be on the correct path to 'greenness-es,' the application that runs your hardware must be on some sort of carbon reduction enabler. Consider selecting a machine that offers the best combination of operations per a second, per a watt, and minimum idle power. Add a high-inlet temperature tolerance and high delta-T to top off your power-efficient IT infrastructure.

The location of your data center matters too. Consider a data center in Chicago, beyond windy and cold conditions, virtually no extreme conditions exist. Due to the lack of extreme conditions, hosting in Chicago is cheaper and better for the environment. With Colocation Chicago, lower levels of energy are used to cool down the data center, and maintain security. There are many more ways to ensure the data center you own, use, or are building is 'green.' Doing research on a facility, including, location, temperature, equipment, air waste, etc, should be done prior to placement. Do not forget to consider the state and city in which to place your equipment; some spots are truly better than others.

For small businesses trying to stay above the water, saving money any way possible is a must. More specifically, small online businesses need a reliable and powerful IT infrastructure at a low cost. One way to save money while securing your business' critical data is through colocation services. A company can host their own equipment while enjoying a data center built to provide technical innovation, client support, high density compatibilities and multi layered, high level security. Maintain your websites important elements such as data and bandwidth on a low cost dedicated server or one of the flexible plans.

If you are located in San Diego there are many options to choose from. There are data centers that can provide services ranging from basic web hosting to specialized mission-oriented services. Regardless, San Diego data centers are equipped to withstand natural disasters, power outages, and other interruptions. Further, the data centers include fiber optic networks, backup networks, and security features. Colocation San Diego technicians are trained to industry-leading standards and are able to provide any support your company needs. It is as easy as determining you and your company's needs and making phone calls to any of San Diego's data centers.

 

With many data centers moving towards green energy to reduce the facility's energy consumption, PUE has become an all-important attribute to analyze and monitor. For example, a data center in New York can consume enough energy to power 200,000 homes. Power is consumed at a high rate because of the various networking and hosting hardware present throughout the data center. Not to mention the environmental control and monitoring hardware that goes into the upkeep of an ideal environment for server hosting.

Maximizing the efficiency of a dedicated server will greatly aid in reducing the power consumption of a data center while not affecting the performance of dedicated servers hosted within the facility. The standards body for performance benchmarks, or SPEC, has developed a tool-kit that will enable a data center to monitor and accurately measure the energy efficiency of a servers dedicated.  The Server Efficiency Rating Tool (SERT) will allow data centers the ability to identify the most energy efficient servers when deciding which servers to purchase.

The Push for Energy Efficiency

As many hosting provider struggle with soaring energy cost, energy efficiency in a data center has become an important topic. It is incredibly difficult to measure the efficiency when purchasing new equipment due to competing claims made by various IT vendors. This pushed for the establishment of the first Energy Star for Servers program that, although address some concerns, did not go far enough to spotlight the efficiency of a server. The program only took into account the power supply of a server and the consumption of power when the server sits idle. It failed to measure the consumption of a server when it begins running workloads.

Improved Energy Ratings with SERT

The SERT was built as a tool to help providers make an informed decision when deciding on new technology to purchase.  It was designed for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to determine the power efficiency of a server and gives it a detailed rating for providers to review. Although it is still in beta testing, the tool promises to provide an aggregated rating based on all the workload types a server can run. This will give an in-depth for providers shopping for new servers and clients that want energy efficiency for a specific type of workload. For instance, if a client plan to host a user generated video website that stores and plays videos, he/she would want to choose the most efficient low cost dedicated servers to host on. With the new Energy Star rating, the clients can better determine which brand of server will perform video processing in an efficient manner.

To recent watchers of Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol climbing up the world's tallest building while trying to break into the hotel's server room may seem easy. If Tom Cruise, who is 49, can do it so can you. For people that own their server or house it in a secure data center, the movie may have scared you. There is always that chance that someone will climb the side of the data center in Chicago or your home town, break in, and then have a gun fight in the middle of it. Then again, the chance of that happening is slim to none.

On the other hand, the sand storm coming towards the hotel is a real threat. Natural disasters can ruin your server and data center. Cruise never fixed the broken window he created before the sand storm came which probably would have created a problem for the hotel's server. For people that haven't seen the movie, do not worry Cruise or rather Ethan Hunt, leaves the hotel before the server is ruined.

Natural Disasters at Data Centers do happen. Data centers are made to withstand most natural disasters unfortunately sometimes Mother Nature is too strong. Luckily there are locations in the United States that are almost free from natural disasters such as Chicago. Colocation Chicago is in a secure area that is 240 miles away from the nearest earthquake zone. For small businesses and industry-leading companies in the Chicago area this is great! For Cruise and his movie, Chicago's lack of natural disasters just doesn't make for a thrilling two. Thankfully Cruise chooses to shoot up a hotel's server room in Dubai instead.