As people continue to embrace working from home, the demand for working internet, higher bandwidth, and reliable data center and edge facilities has never been greater. Simply put, companies can’t afford for their infrastructure to fail, which is why uptime should be a top concern when selecting your data center colocation provider.
Colocation offers organizations the best of both worlds -- the ability to match and exceed IT and business requirements, without the significant upfront capital costs and long-term operating expenses. Colocation facilities build and maintain the infrastructure, network access, and connections -- making it easier for organizations to quickly deploy and scale cloud computing, support data-intensive IoT applications, and direct-connect to network providers and other enterprises.
However, perhaps the most important benefit colocation can offer is reliable, redundant, and uninterrupted infrastructure services, that can be depended on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
With today’s influx of data and constantly shifting landscape, a 24x7 critical environment can provide organizations with a number of competitive advantages.
Reliable, Uninterrupted Infrastructure
A power outage has the ability to affect a company’s overall IT infrastructure, sending everything from servers, networks, to printers offline. While many data centers claim to offer uninterrupted infrastructure, it’s important to ensure the infrastructure is actually reliable. For example, oftentimes, data center providers may claim to offer uninterrupted infrastructure, but actually have a history of downtime. If interrupted infrastructure isn’t reliable -- it isn’t actually uninterrupted. Period.
This is especially important depending on the nature of the business. If technically sophisticated organizations, such as large financial institutions or research organizations, were to have a server go down, even for a second, chaos could ensue. For example, imagine being in the middle of documenting a critical piece of research, when your equipment overheats and shuts down, causing your systems to crash. Organizations such as Harvard or MIT simply can’t afford for that to happen -- so it’s imperative they are connected to reliable, uninterrupted infrastructure that guarantees 100% uptime across network connectivity, power, environmental (cooling/humidity), and security components.
Systems Capable of Responding to Failure Modes Without Impacting Service Availability
Interruptions to servers supporting client data, even as small as even a millisecond, can result in system failures. While a millisecond may not seem like a long time, millisecond power anomalies can still cause servers to reboot, which in turn may require days of work for IT teams to get everything back up and running.
It’s important to ensure your data center provider’s equipment is able to withstand power anomalies, and have access to back-up generators in the event of a failure. When you have systems capable of responding to failure modes, your organization never has to miss a beat or experience downtime in service availability. It is also important that the critical systems supporting you are fault tolerant, where no single component failure can cause a system to fail.
On-Site, Skilled Technicians Available Anytime
Oftentimes, IT issues and outages can occur outside of normal business hours, which is why it’s imperative to have the support of skilled technicians, licensed electricians, certified HVAC experts, and Bell-trained telco specialists available around the clock.
In many instances, critical environments can also provide troubleshooting support, installation assistance, racking and stacking services, and more. With on-site support available, organizations can rest assured systems are being proactively monitored -- and if an issue does occur, a technician will be available for immediate support.
Here at Markley, our Operations staff undergoes rigorous testing prior to being offered a position. Their first two months is dedicated to training, to understand the critical infrastructure, policies and procedures at Markley Group. Then, in order to cover a shift, we require all employees to pass a certification test. After our Operations staff have passed the test, we require additional training on specific systems by the manufacturer, monthly failure scenario drills, and mandatory online technical and safety courses. We hold our Operations staff to the highest standards – to ensure they are prepared to respond to any critical system issue that arises.
We understand that IT outages shouldn’t happen – and they certainly shouldn’t stop business if they do. That’s why we work around the clock to keep our customers up and running, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. To learn more about our 24x7 on-site support and colocation offerings, please visit: https://www.markleygroup.com/data-center
