Colocation Sales Support

At Colocation Sales.com, we provide our business customers with access to quality colocation hosting services, dedicated server hosting services and top quality data centers throughout the world. What do quality colocation hosting services entail? What important colocation hosting elements should I be looking for in a data center? This colocation service overview will cover these points and more. For additional information on colocation, fill out the colocation hosting services quote for on the right to receive a free, no obligation colocation hosting quote.

Colocation hosting services can accommodate a virtually unlimited range of configurations from a single server on a shared rack in secure space to a full, secure, locked Internet Data center Cage (supporting four full racks of equipment), to combined cages that secure hundreds of square feet of space. Other secure-space options include dedicated server hosting, locked cabinets and highly secure vaults (in select facilities). The vault incorporates video surveillance, separate air conditioning and fire systems and secure biometric access control to satisfy the most stringent security requirements.

Reliability
Data centers are engineered to include multiple levels of redundancy, ensuring maximum availability of mission critical applications. From network architecture to HVAC services, redundancy has been accounted for in all areas. Conditioned power is backed up with UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supplies) and diesel generators.

Power Management
Multiple UPS (Uninterruptible Power Source) systems eliminate fluctuations and electrical irregularities delivering clean, continuous power to all critical systems. Generators ensure power is available even in the event of a Metro-wide blackout. All systems within each Data Center are configured to be N+1 redundant. Electricity backup capabilities at our data centers are essentially unlimited. Short-notice refueling contracts for the diesel generators are maintained with multiple vendors at each data center location.

Environmental Controls
All of our data centers are built on raised floors and have high-volume, zoned temperature control systems. The data centers have multiple air conditioning units configured to ensure proper heat dissipation. We maintain multiple (n+1) HVAC units within each data center The HVAC units are powered by both normal and emergency electrical systems and are monitored 24x7x365 by on site personnel.

Fire Suppression
The fire suppression system at each data center employs state-of-the-art "sniffer" systems that detect smoke from the earliest stages of combustion. This detection system is augmented by heat detection and dry-pipe sprinkler systems.

Seismic Engineering
We have done extensive engineering to ensure that any Data center located in a region prone to seismic activity is braced for such events. Design elements include, seismic isolation equipment to cushion facilities against movement as well as seismic bracing earthquake bracing on all equipment racks. All Data centers have racks anchored to the concrete slab below the raised floor.

Network
Our Internet Data centers are designed to get customer data onto the Internet fast. From our world class Tier 1 network providers, which provides for 27% of the world’s internet routes, to the QoS-enabled Intelligent IP (IIP) network-based IP VPN, we can meet your needs for network services.

Security
We have taken all levels of security into account in the design of each Internet Data center The physical and logical integrity of all Data center systems is paramount to ensuring customer infrastructure is un compromised. Customers can also leverage Security Services to their Colocation environment to best suit their needs. The following is a list of security measures deployed at each Data center:

On premise security guards
Building exterior - cameras, false entrances, vehicle blockades, parking lot design, bulletproof glass/walls, unmarked buildings
Biometric systems which include palm scanners
Security cameras with digital recorders, Pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) capabilities
Portals and Man traps, only a single person authenticated at one time

Managed Colocation Hosting Services
Foundation Hosting allows you to gain the advantages of managed IT services without making the commitment to commodity IT infrastructure and facilities. You maintain full control over the operating system and applications, including licensing, installation, monitoring and management. We take on the burden of server hardware procurement, racking and stacking, space and power management, as well as on-site hardware “break/fix” support. As a result, you can eliminate capital expenses from your hosting growth cycle with scalable operational expenses with a defined business term, and keep unit costs fixed with predictable monthly recurring per-server costs.

Intelligent Hosting delivers a traditional fully managed hosting solution on a dedicated platform, supporting a single operating system and simple storage requirements. The offering includes dedicated server hardware, operating system software licenses, hosting of the server and complete operating system monitoring and management. Optimal for higher I/O applications without High Availability requirements, the Intelligent Hosting service is available on HP and Sun server lines – with CPU, RAM, hard disk options and hard disk capacity configured to meet your specific needs. Fiber Channel interfaces and additional Ethernet network interfaces provide additional expansion options.

Virtual Intelligent Hosting is a highly scalable and flexible managed dedicated hosting service leveraging VM ware® Infrastructure Enterprise. With Virtual Intelligent Hosting, partnering with us lets you avoid the typical costs of exploring vitalization solutions in-house. The platform allows a single physical server to be partitioned into multiple self-contained virtual machines, each with its own operating system and set of applications to meet your needs. So you can run Windows®, Linux® and Solarium all on the same server. We fully manage and monitor VM ware and the instance operating systems, allowing your IT staff to focus on the application layer. With built-in fail over functionality via VM ware® High Availability (HA), Virtual Intelligent Hosting is ideally suited to applications with variable, light-to-medium compute loads and delivers significant cost-savings along with increased operational efficiency, flexibility and IT service levels.

Utility Compute provides an applications platform that delivers high availability, scalability and flexibility, and a lower total cost of ownership than is found with traditional managed hosting solutions. These blade-based servers are dedicated to a specific customer but operated within a multi-tenant chassis to provide quick provisioning service capability – in as little as five business days. We provide the server hardware and software license for Windows®-, SolariuM and Linux®-based operating systems, as well as certain commercial applications, and fully monitor and manage the server hardware and operating system. With a variety of CPU speeds and memory configurations available on Intel®- and AMD-based blades, Utility Compute offers a hardware-based High Availability option allowing production servers to access a pool of fail over servers. Using diskless blades, the service also leverages a high-performance fiber channel-based SAN for carrier-class storage capacity and performance.

Managed Applications A broad range of Managed Applications are available as complementary offerings to the Managed Compute portfolio. These applications provide businesses the means to further reduce IT spend while maintaining or improving the efficiency and performance of web, database or email applications. Our Managed Applications include Messaging and Collaboration, Managed Database

Applications and Managed Web Server Applications.

Monitoring
We offer monitoring to full management of monitored objects on customer-provided hardware and software systems, allowing for constant reporting and analysis of your network devices, web servers, operating systems, applications and database systems.

Three levels of Intelligent Monitoring are available to meet varied business requirements – from basic agent-less ICMP ping, TCP port polling and URL monitoring to a robust intelligent agent-based monitoring service that includes alerting, validation and basic troubleshooting. Intelligent Monitoring is supported by the 24x7x365 Service Center and fully redundant NOC for quick response and resolution of customer problems. You control your own monitoring thresholds and requirements through the customer portal.

Intelligent Monitoring helps you reduce hardware and software systems support costs and improve your end users’ experience.

Storage, Backup and Vaulting
Faced with considerable data growth, organizations of all sizes are looking for ways to store, manage, archive and retrieve all files in the most efficient and cost-effective manner possible. For companies contending with server sprawl, achieving lower cost of ownership, reduced management and improved productivity is essential.

You can rely on our Storage, Backup and Vaulting services to safeguard your enterprise data from both external threats and internal breakdowns. The suite of highly flexible Storage solutions includes Utility Storage, Utility Backup and Vaulting, Storage Care and Backup Care. When your data simply must be online and efficient, reliable storage management is vital to containing costs. Storage Services can provide the management expertise you need to increase operational efficiencies.

Utility Storage provides your organization with carrier-class storage services without having to absorb the costs of a fully dedicated array and the supporting services to install, configure, manage and monitor the storage system. With Utility Storage services, you can benefit from a storage environment for applications that provides higher availability and scalability, lower total cost of ownership, simplified management and a higher return on investment. Utility Storage offers Storage Area Network (SAN) and Network Attached Storage (NAS) connectivity options and multiple storage tiers to suit your requirements. The offering supports I/O-intensive production data that typically requires carrier-class performance and protection and is available in 50 GB increments. The service also supports persistent data, allowing for cost-efficient storage of large capacities of less frequently accessed data. This multi-tenant solution offers true capacity-on-demand storage, with the ability for you to add and pay for additional storage volumes as needed.

Utility Backup and Vaulting
Information preservation and on-demand recovery is vital for any business today. To deliver on your data backup needs, it is worthwhile to look beyond the direct costs of hardware and software procurement, off-site storage facilities and administrative staff. We remove the overhead associated with provisioning, implementation and expertise in backup facilities management, so that your business can focus on its core competencies. Utility Backup and Vaulting services will help you guard against the loss of essential business data – whether due to catastrophic disaster, human error, software corruption or hardware malfunction. Our pay-as-you-grow model provides scheduled backup of live business data, restore on-demand, and vaulting in an off-site location. As a result, you can generally benefit from a lower total cost of ownership and higher availability for important data than when internally sourcing these requirements.

Storage Care
Recognizing your business may need to leverage existing storage infrastructure, we offer Storage Care management services to monitor and manage certain storage arrays and Storage Area Network (SAN) fabric. For assistance with fine-tuning your storage configuration to your current business needs, we provide Professional Services for activities outside the scope of standard services or requiring additional hours of support. As part of the Storage Care offering for customer-owned storage equipment, we can assist with adding capacity and creating new LUN's, adding additional hosts to the SAN fabric, managing "break/fix" events, and planning and implementing technology refreshes and upgrades to meet changing storage demands.

Backup Care
Backup management is often seen as a function that simply needs to exist. It is rarely a business’s core competency or revenue-driving function. However, it can be a drain on any business when it is not managed properly due to high staff turnover, inefficient backup times or an inability to restore data. For the occasional events that take place requiring minor, or sometimes major, adjustments to a backup environment, we provide Backup Care services on customer-owned equipment. We offer tape backup and restore on-demand using customer-owned high-capacity and high-availability tape libraries. You can rest easy knowing that you can still use your dedicated backup solution in a data center without having to deploy additional staff or resources to manage it.