Below we’ve highlighted the most important considerations. To see the full-length document about choosing a data center, use this link.
The Most Common Considerations
Location. Your data center should be away from coastlines to avoid major hurricane damage, out of flood plains, and outside of known tornado alleys. It should also have multiple routes to it and be located within driving distance for many employees.
Connectivity. The access you get to multiple telecommunications carriers is a major advantage of contracting with a data center. Therefore, ask critical questions. Is the facility carrier-neutral with diverse points of entry? If you need a high availability (HA) protocol, ask if that is an option. Is a service like Megaport, a platform that allows for a direct connection to cloud providers, available?
Reliability. Learning about reliability, or uptime, is a must. For a data center to ensure uptime, infrastructure for backup power and cooling should be in place. Inquire what a data center’s uptime is and how they accomplish this. (Hint – It should be at least five 9s or 99.999%. We at FIBERTOWN go a step further to provide 100% uptime.)
Service Level Agreement. Well-written SLAs include an assurance about response time, security protocols, bandwidth availability, and more. The SLA should also include what steps the data center will take if it fails to meet the contractual uptime.
The Most Overlooked Considerations
The remaining five considerations are more nuanced. Technology professionals in your company (or you) will guide your search for a location, connectivity, reliability, and a strong SLA. But, the other five components of a great data center relate to the humans who run it.
We can write article after article about redundant systems, circuits, cloud providers, etc., but it’s humans who are at the heart of a data center.
We discuss in more detail these human factors – reputation, on-site staffing, timeliness, workspace accommodations, and the ease of doing business – in more detail here. We’ve included questions to ask and how to gain insight into a data center’s customer relations.
Have Questions? FIBERTOWN Has Answers.
FIBERTOWN is a data center with two locations (Houston and Bryan-College Station, Texas), and we’re proud of the services we provide. The Top 9 Considerations document is a guide for choosing the best data center for your company.