Improve your reliability and security through colocation, and reduce your costs!

30 Jan 2023, by Slade Baylis

For almost every business, the digital frontier is quickly becoming - if it hasn’t already - one of the most important factors when it comes to growth and overall success. With this being the case, IT infrastructure - such as file and data storage, application and web services, and security appliances - will be the cornerstones when it comes to enabling and protecting the digital front of your business.

As it’s historically been the norm, many organisations still find themselves in the position of having these services hosted on equipment located on-site. The equipment and servers that are required to run these services need to live somewhere, so the default choice in the past has been to have them located at the same premises as the business itself. This makes sense in a lot of ways – by having these systems on site they are able to make use of a location that they already maintain, power, cool, and pay for regardless. This approach also gives them full control, allowing them to set their own policies and procedures around security and access to those systems, as well as have control over the background infrastructure required to maintain their operation.

However, each of these aspects can also be seen as a drawback due to the responsibility and corresponding expense that is carried with each. It’s for this reason that the overall trend for most organisations has been to transition their physical systems to either be colocated within a data centre or to move entirely to virtualised solutions in the cloud.

In this article, we’ll be going over that first option of colocating your infrastructure within a data centre.  We’ll explain the reasons behind why so many choose to go down this path. We’ll cover the ways that it can help you with security and compliance, as well as help improve the reliability of your systems and increase uptime –  and explain how you can achieve both of these whilst still also reducing the overall expenses to your business!

First, what is colocation?

In short, colocation is a service in which organisations can rent space within a data centre for housing their servers and other computing hardware. With these services, the infrastructure required to operate these systems – such as the physical space, power, cooling, bandwidth, networking, and security - is handled by the provider. 

Why should you colocate? What are the advantages over hosting your hardware on-premises?

By relying on a data centre to provide these essential services, organisations are able to externalise any cost involved with purchasing and maintaining the infrastructure required for housing, power, and cooling that equipment, whilst at the same time allowing them to retain full ownership and control over their hardware. It’s through the sharing of ongoing operational costs with other colocation tenants, as well as economies of scale, that enables these organisations to reduce their own expenses for aspects such as power, cooling, and bandwidth.

Not only does this model help reduce upfront and ongoing expenses, but data centres are often able to provide more robust and reliable infrastructure than what a business could typically provide themselves with an on-premises solution. This is reflected in the near 100% uptime guarantees that most data centres offer in their SLAs (Service Level Agreement). This reliability is achieved in a myriad of ways – it typically involves the utilisation of UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply) systems, multiple levels of backup generators, and primary and fall-back climate control systems to ensure the data centre is continually cooled.

Although the term has a negative connotation outside the tech space, having multiple levels of backups of these systems is referred to as having increased “redundancy”. When it comes to IT, having redundancy built into your services is a good thing, as it means that your systems are more reliable and fault-tolerant!

Whilst not always the case, one other benefit of choosing to colocate your hardware with a data centre, is that most can offer remote assistance and support. Often referred to as “remote hands”, the more basic levels allow clients to have the data centre staff perform tasks that would require an onsite presence. For example, simple tasks such as power cycling an appliance (changing how servers are connected to a network), or installing and uninstalling servers (which is referred to as “racking” and “unracking” due to servers being mounted in cabinets called “racks” which allow hardware to be stacked vertically) - are often commonly covered under basic “remote hands” plans.

However, depending on the data centre you choose to host with, this support can be even more extensive – it can cover replacing hard drives, RAM, or other internal components; troubleshooting issues with servers; managing enquiries/escalations to suppliers; or even extend to solution design and project management.

Networking is another advantage to colocating your hardware. Due to the multi-tenant nature of colocation, many different organisations utilise these services with data centres globally. What this means is that other service providers, such as ISPs, Telecom Carriers, and cloud-service providers are often utilising the same facility that your hardware is located within. What this enables are services called “cross connections” – which is a physical or virtual network connection between two different termination locations. In plain English, what this means is that you are able to connect your network directly to networks run by other providers as required, allowing you to lower latency to their services and lower your overall bandwidth usage and any costs associated with it!

Moving into the cloud – What’s required to move to a colocated approach?

With all these advantages, the next question becomes “what does the process of moving to a colocation approach look like?”.   The good news is - that it’s usually relatively simple! The process itself is often referred to as a “lift and shift” – as it involves the moving of your infrastructure “as-is” into a data centre. This means that the hardware that’s currently being used is moved from its current location into a data centre, with the networking configured to be close to identical to how it’s currently configured on-site.

The one thing that is required to enable this type of “lift and shift” approach is fast and reliable “comms”, or networking, between your location and the new home of those systems. When your systems are at your own premises, they are often only accessed via on-site private networks. These private networks are usually by their nature fast and reliable, as well as secure, as they can only be accessed from your location.  When moving them to a data centre, extending those private networks to that same data centre will often be required to ensure the connections remain fast, reliable, and secure.

The primary way of extending your network to a data centre will be through the use of “point-to-point” networks. As the name suggests, these point-to-point services allow you to extend your private network from one location in Australia to another, utilising pre-existing or newly installed fibre in the ground to deliver these services. Once configured, this allows you to have a fast, reliable, and secure connection to your systems, almost on-par with the speeds and reliability you enjoyed when the servers sat right next to you.

For certain locations, there may not be any pre-existing fibre near their locations, and having fibre installed to reach a new location can often be an exorbitantly expensive ordeal! However, with this being the case, there are alternate solutions to this problem - one of which is to use existing NBN fibre and infrastructure to get a point-to-point service instead. These NBN point-to-point connections are called NBN EE (NBN Enterprise Ethernet) and they are able to connect two locations with speeds that match the residential or business grade NBN internet connections. Due to utilising this existing NBN infrastructure, these connections are often also much cheaper than fibre alternatives.

One thing to be aware of is that these NBN fibre connections often vary in one fundamental way when compared with dedicated fibre. With fibre based point-to-point networks provided by the likes of Telstra or Optus, the links are often “dedicated” connections. What this means is that the full connection speed of these connections is available for you to use at any time, regardless of the activity on other areas of the provider’s network. With NBN offerings though, these connections are sold as shared/contended services, meaning that the full speed of your point-to-point connection can’t be guaranteed, especially during peak load times. It’s for this reason that each business will need to evaluate the cost saving versus the impact of that potential reduction in connection speed.

A quick summary – The key benefits of utilising colocation

  • Lowered infrastructure costs – When utilising colocation services with a data centre, you are able to avoid large expenses associated with the infrastructure required to support and provide reliable power and cooling for your systems. Instead, by sharing the ongoing operational costs with other colocation tenants, you are able to pay for these on an ongoing basis instead, which is often cheaper than self-hosted alternatives.
  • Redundancy and improved reliability – Through increased redundancy and more levels of backups of critical infrastructure, the servers and hardware you colocate are less likely to have interruptions to the power, cooling, and networking required for your services to operate.
  • Speed and response times – If the data centre comes with extensive support offerings, having your hardware located there will allow for immediate access to your equipment/infrastructure, thus allowing the support staff there to quickly provide the support you require. This speed and response time of data centre is a big bonus when compared to having to get a third-party IT provider to support your onsite hardware as they usually comes with extra costs and delays caused by any travel required to access your systems.
  • Cross-connectivity – Due to hosting your hardware in a multi-tenanted environment, you are able to utilise cross-connectivity to the networks of other providers to reduce latency and bandwidth expenses - this includes connections to ISPs, Telecom carriers, and cloud-service providers.
  • Physical & digital security – Most data centres maintain extremely high levels of physical security, including biometric authorisation, 24x7x365 surveillance, access control, and more!  In addition, some data centres also offer added security on the digital frontier – for example, Micron21 includes basic DDoS mitigation for all services, with other additional security services available upon request.
  • Scaling your requirements – When hosting your hardware at your own site you can reach a scale where to expand further is impossible due to space constraints or unfeasible due to the cost involved to do so. Within a data centre however, you are able to scale your infrastructure as much as needed to meet your requirements, whether it’s through colocating additional hardware or utilising virtualised solutions alongside your current physical servers.
  • Ease of adoption – Shifting from an on-site model to a colocated one is often fairly simple, usually just involving the “lift and shift” of existing systems into a data centre and establishing a fast, reliable, and secure point-to-point connection into that new location.

Allowing for future growth – How colocation enables expansion through hybrid-cloud approaches

Once you have your hardware located in a data centre, a whole world of opportunity opens up with your options to expand your systems in the future. For most businesses, a point is often reached where their requirements exceed what their current hardware can deliver – whether its not performing at the level that it needs to for certain use cases, or just a capacity issue due to not having enough CPU, RAM, or Disk to meet your growing requirements.

In these cases, the go-to solution is often to look at purchasing additional hardware in order to gain that extra performance or room to grow. However, this can often be quite an expensive ordeal due to the fact that you not only need to make sure there is enough room for your immediate requirements, but also make sure there is room for growth over the next 12, 24, or even 36 months! For those who already have their services hosted in a data centre however, there are often alternative approaches that can allow for this expansion without requiring such large capital expenditure.

Instead of needing to acquire further hardware, for those who currently have their systems in a capable data centre, you can choose to run virtual workloads alongside your current hardware. From entry-level VPS (Virtual Private Servers) to higher end VCS (VMware Cloud Servers) - these virtual server solutions can be configured to run alongside your current physical infrastructure, even being able to share the same networking configuration. What this allows for is the expansion of your requirements over and above what you current physical servers are capable, either as an interim measure whilst you evaluate purchasing further hardware or as part of a slow transition toward an entirely cloud-based solution in the future.

One unique offering from Micron21 is the ability for our clients to colocate and contribute their servers to a “public cloud”.  In short, a public cloud is a cloud service that allows different customers to utilise the same compute and physical storage of back-end hardware – this more efficient use of server resources allows for services to be delivered at a much more affordable price-point. In addition to that, by contributing a server to a public cloud they are able to gain the advantages of hyper-convergence and high-availability to increase the reliability of their systems, all without requiring the three-server minimum that’s usually required!

We’ve introduced and explained this amazing technology in our previous Protect your mission critical systems with Hyper-Convergence article, but in short, hyper-convergence allows businesses to protect their systems from downtime by automatically replicating their virtual machines across a fleet of physical servers (called a “cluster”). Not only that, but this technology also allows for automatic fall-over should the primary physical server ever run into issues. If issues arise, such as hardware failure on the primary physical server, the others pick up the slack and the virtual machines continue to function as per normal regardless.

It’s due to all these advantages that we recommend that any business currently hosting their systems within their own premises look at colocating their equipment instead. Doing so not only can provide a myriad of technological improvements and increase the redundancy of your systems, but it also could end up reducing the cost of your IT infrastructure overall!

Looking to colocate your systems with Micron21?

If you have any questions about colocating your hardware at Micron21, you can reach us via email at sales@micron21.com or via phone at 1300 769 972 (Option #1).

We’re happy to help you with any questions that you have as well as make the process of moving your infrastructure into the cloud as easy as possible!

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