Top Three Factors to Consider While Choosing a Data Center for Your Business

Data Centers are the core of the Internet. The computer servers that power the Interne,t call Data Centers their home. If you think of how many billions of online transactions that happen every day you will be amazed to know that the final resting place of all these stored transactions is the Data centers. This Amazement quickly turns into Panic when you think about how much private data and vital data is stored there. Over years the Data Center technologies have evolved a lot into much advanced techniques like server virtualization and high speed power houses. There are more than 100 factors one should evaluate a data center against before choosing one to home their servers. In this article we will see the three main that in turn dictate the rest of the factors.

1. Security: We just now saw how much data is stored, processed and served by the data centers. All these are vital data that makes or breaks a global economy. Security includes the data encryption capability of the servers, the security of the uplinks or the backbone networks that are employed. It includes security mechanisms like the Public key dongles and the capability to store the data securely and safely. The less talked aspect is the physical security of the box and the whole data center itself. We are talking about limiting snooping and sniffing the packets, but what happens if one person just walks in carries off a server. How much credit card data, transaction details, bank details and the SSN’s get compromised! You can have a slow box but an insecure one creates a ton of problems in the form of countless lawsuits. Choose the data center that excels in all aspects of security. Ask pointed questions, expect the right answers.

2. Reliability: The next important aspect is the reliability of the systems and the data center infrastructure itself. We are just not talking about backup machines or RAID 5 HDD. We are talking of highly available power systems with sufficient backup time and in house generators for emergencies. The additional aspect to consider is reliability of the company that offers the data center and the persons working for the company. You many want to talk a little bit about their hiring and daily authentication and authorization process if you are even a mid-sized company. Disaster recovery systems are critical for the five 9’s in reliability don’t be stalled because a California power-company had a complete emergency shutdown due to an earthquake or a hurricane in Florida. You should be able to gracefully failover to alternate sites.

3. High Speed: The third aspect is the much needed speed. This is more complex than you think. Adding a word saying that we have the high end servers making a data center a high speed infrastructure is minimum requirement. The network uplinks and the Internet backbone the center are connected to are also very important. You have to ask for custom solutions like caching technologies, load balancing blueprints and high end routers, switches and backplanes.

This article just touches on these major concepts and you have to do sufficient research on the keywords employed in this article. As I said there are 100 factors to consider before choosing the right datacenter. Any good company owning a data center would openly help you evaluate their infrastructure against these factors.

You can find a good Data Center with many of the good capabilities discussed in this article in fastpcnet.net. Ask them about their custom solution and how they measure against the deciding factors and you will be happy at the answers.

Author Holds a Masters in Distributed computing and does freelancing for many great Internet companies through the no fee free freelance website freelancefree.com.

Benefits of Working In a Data Center

As the Internet continues to grow and produce large amounts of traffic the need for data centers and data center management increases. This continued growth creates data center jobs and IT careers in the technology field. Data Centers not only provide large hubs for Internet traffic, but it also completes the network infrastructure of most mid-large size companies. Data centers usually house thousands of computers, servers, and technical components. This in itself tells why it is a tremendous benefit to working within a data center. Just the amount of knowledge you can gain while on the job is rewarding enough. Having a data center job puts you on the bleeding edge of technology and hi-tech equipment. By working in a data center you will naturally be more advance than your peers who work in different industries experienced in technology.

Data center jobs consist of many different job types which fall under information technology, such as: system administration, network administration, IT security, computer operations, help desk support, server administration, pc repair, engineering, and so much more. If you ever been to school for a computer-related field or you always had an interest to work with computers then working in a data center should have been at the top of your list. Though, most do not consider data center jobs when looking for a job in the information technology field. This is mainly because data center jobs are merely overlooked. Most individuals consider working for a company or corporation in an industry other than data centers, mainly in a company like where they previously worked, before being technically inclined. Gaining a data center job is exactly why you went to school or aligned yourself within the technology field of work.

Data centers are inhabited with individuals who are fairly intelligent, usually skilled professionals with an educational background. The benefit of surrounding yourself with knowledgeable individuals is that it enhances your own technical aptitude and empowers your keen technical sense. Another benefit to working in a data center is many times the operations are around the clock (24/7), which means you may have the option of being flexible and working flex schedules, at your leisure. The biggest benefit of working in a data center is “stability”. The fact being that so many operations, calculations, and transactions depend solely on data centers - society cannot afford to lose data centers. Data centers will always be around and continue to thrive, so this means data center jobs will never fall short. Even in the wake of economic hardships, data centers still did not take a plunge or lose its clarity. If you are reading this article right now, then more than likely at some point a data center involvement allowed me to deliver this article to you. Data center jobs are for life!

Ant Onaf is the owner and founder of DataCenterLife which is a job portal dedicated to data center jobs and information technology jobs. Primarily, DataCenterLife.com offers job searching, resume searching, job posting, and resume posting for individuals, companies, and recruiters in the data center industry and profession.

Colocation Hosting

When companies place their servers on the premises of a third party, it is known as colocation hosting. The third party, or hosting company, also provides web connectivity. Dedicated hosting is suitable for those companies who want to have control over their website and its operations. There are others who require net connectivity services and hardware delivery, in which case they can opt for internal hosting. Here, the company only pays for the networking services. Companies that opt for collocation hosting own the server and ensure that all the required information is loaded onto it. Once this is taken care of, the server is ready to be placed on the premises of the third party. Such companies also assist their customers in building a server as per their requirements, i.e., they customize a server as per directions.

Colocation providers offer “Server Monitoring” contracts, wherein the norms for providing the service are stated. As such, they are required to keep a watch over the operations of the system. This ranges from facilities provided for placing the server, the accessibility/security aspect, the backup plan, troubleshooting devices and bandwidth. Hence, the contract should be signed taking into consideration all of the issues mentioned above. Servers have standard configurations of 1U or 2U. Those with a greater number of hard drives come with a capacity of 3U or 4U. The costs increase with server capacity. Typically, the costs for colocating a 1U server are less than those for a higher configuration.

There are companies that offer “cheap hosting services” with excellent performance and service. However, when opting for such hosts, care should be taken that the required contract documents contain all the important issues related to colocation hosting.

Colocation provides detailed information on Colocation, Colocation Services, Colocation Hosting, Colocation Facilities and more. Colocation is affiliated with Bandwidth Management.