In a recent article, I argued that when IT deployments reach a certain size, colocation is the most cost-effective infrastructure option. Supporting that argument is a new report from 451 Research, which shows that private clouds often have a lower total cost of ownership than public cloud platforms.
A private cloud is a cloud platform built on private infrastructure, infrastructure under the control of a single organization. Public cloud platforms, in contrast, are multi-tenant: many organizations launch cloud servers on the same underlying bare metal infrastructure and none have insight into or control over the physical layer.
The number of server hosting options available to businesses seems to multiply by the day, but behind the marketing fluff there are really only a few options worth considering: on-premises, cloud, colocation, and dedicated server plans. Each has its place, but I’d like to take a closer look at the types of organization that choose to host infrastructure in a colocation data center and their reasons for choosing colocation instead of the alternatives.
The colocation industry is home to a vast range of vendors with wildly varying capabilities. At the bottom end of the market, all it takes is the room, power, and bandwidth to house a few servers and keep them connected to the internet most of the time. At the top end of the market are enterprise-grade data centers capable of supporting the largest server deployments and bandwidth requirements, with redundancy built into every level of their operations.
If you need more resources than shared hosting can offer, there’s a good chance you’re going to end up going with one of two options – either a virtual private server or a dedicated server. Thing is, some hosts are…actually pretty bad at explaining what they are, and how they differ from one another. That’s where we come in.
We’ll clear the air, and help you decide which type of server is the best fit for your organization.
Once a nuisance that only affected consumers, ransomware has grown into a huge problem for businesses of all sizes. Over the last few months, ransomware attacks have damaged businesses and government organizations across the world.
Incremental back-ups hosted on secure colocated servers are the best defense against ransomware attacks like those that hit healthcare operations across Europe last month. Without isolated, verified back-ups in a secure data center, there’s little an organization can do if its data is lost to a ransomware attack.
The quality of colocation providers and colocation data centers varies enormously, from companies that will house your infrastructure in a world-class data center they own and manage to fly-by-night operators who can’t guarantee great service no matter what their marketing might say. If your company has decided to host its hardware in a colocation data center, you should take the time to comprehensively research prospective providers before taking the leap.
To help you out, we’ve compiled a list of the five most important questions to keep in mind before you commit your hardware to a colocation provider.
In some sections of the IT media, cloud native applications are a big deal. What that actually means is somewhat hazy, as you might expect of a term trumpeted by consulting firms. But in a nutshell, cloud native applications are applications built to use containers and open source software, using known good patterns like “containers are cattle, and not pets,” and hosted in such a way that developers can focus on development, rather than infrastructure.
Before choosing an infrastructure hosting platform, it’s important to understand both the qualities of the infrastructure and the demands your application will make of it. In today’s infrastructure space, it’s particularly important to balance the specific benefits of cloud platforms and bare metal. The cloud’s strength is scalability. Whatever other benefits a cloud platform might offer, the ability to quickly deploy virtual servers to meet demand is its raison d’être.
Servers cost money to buy, power, cool, and house. It’s in the interest of businesses to deploy only the servers they need, and to avoid deploying or maintaining servers that are no longer useful. So it’s natural to assume that when servers aren’t being used, they’re repurposed or retired. In an ideal world that might be true, but the reality is quite different.