Companies can choose to construct their own private data centers, often called on-premise or onsite data centers (when built on or near company property). Or, organizations can choose colocation centers where a group of companies share the space and services provided by the data center personnel. A colocation center, like ours in Houston or in Bryan-College Station, Texas, is a great option for most companies because of the cost-effectiveness and a staff solely dedicated to data protection.
Whether your organization is migrating to a data center for the first time or it’s changing from one data center to another, there are points to consider before moving.
Read below for our suggestions. And contact us if you have questions about our Bryan or North Houston colocation centers.
100% Uptime
Every data center has a service level agreement (SLA). This document defines two important aspects – the types of service provided by the center to your company and the amount of downtime allowed by the data center without penalties.
At FIBERTOWN, we offer 100% uptime SLA for power, cooling, and bandwidth services. Most other data centers are 99.999% or “five-nines” as it’s often called. This means, they allow 5.256 minutes of downtime every year (525,600 minutes X .00001).
Our 100% uptime in our SLA makes us stand out from the competitors. And this leads to another point for consideration.
What Uptime Truly Means in the SLA
For FIBERTOWN, our SLA covers power, cooling, and networking. Just like our 100% uptime, this guarantee of all three critical components gives us an edge on our competitors.
We make sure power and cooling and network are up and going, rather than just one of the three. After all, it doesn’t matter if you have power but no networking. You are still unable to communicate with your equipment, which means business halts. And the same is true for networking but no power.
When shopping for a data center, read the SLA carefully to understand what is considered uptime for that provider. And, what components will be guaranteed to be operational – power, cooling, and networking or only one of the three?
Not Happy with Services at Your Current Data Center
This is a common situation for companies. Your organization grows quickly or, perhaps, you didn’t read the SLA fine print. Either way, you sign a contract with a data center and realize it doesn’t meet all of your needs and expectations. While we won’t encourage you to break a contract with another center, there are steps you and your next data center personnel can take to ramp up protection and services until your contract ends with your previous provider.
For example, at FIBERTOWN, we can ramp up services for 90 days prior to a full contract going into effect. The first advantage, you only pay for what you are using. You schedule your move and only pay for those cabinets you migrate to until you get out of your other provider’s agreement.
This leads to the second advantage of a 90-day ramp-up. You get to move in over time. Not a rushed move. Instead, a calculated, well-planned move.
To summarize, we aim to be flexible. Tell us what you need, and we can help find solutions.
As Joe Langston, our Vice President of Operations, says, “Our goal is to aid in our customer’s success.”
Don’t be unhappy with your current provider, or stay for longer than you need. The security of your company’s data is at stake.
What Questions Do You Have for FIBERTOWN?
Choosing a data center and moving there are hard. Studying the SLA and having the tough conversations you must have if a data center is not providing quality protection – none of these things are easy.
And while we can’t make the move easy, we at FIBERTOWN believe data center migration can be easier. We work to make your migration to one of our two locations smooth…a walk in the park.