Hosting Buyer’s Guide   

Anthony Foy examines the key points when considering data centre outsourcing 

For all enterprises, competition ensures a continuing and relentless focus on brand excellence and value-added services. It is now generally accepted that owning and managing infrastructure services are not core skills, and that the best way to deliver IT to the business is by outsourcing operational matters to specialist providers.

To do so, the cost, security and connectivity advantages of data centre outsourcing are becoming accepted practice. Integrated fire control systems, power, physical cooling and much more besides are more cost-effective when provided on a shared basis by a specialist data centre.

With new players joining the market, claiming to offer data centre or hosting services, what criteria can be used to ensure that outsourcing is safe, secure and productive?

Top ten data centre considerations

1              Connectivity

Choose an outsourced data centre with a large number of different carriers. In an outsourced data centre, carriers are competing for your business and the cost savings can be significant – in some cases, enough to pay for the first year’s hosting costs.

2              Power

Ensure that the data centre is capable of handling your power needs. Racks fully populated with blade servers will demand around 40kW, stretching many data centres to the limit

4              Cooling

High power densities bring high cooling requirements, and hotspots that can damage servers and storage. Check that the data centre is capable of providing sufficient, directed cooling.

5              Space

Demand for space in data centres is rising, and your own growth plans might be thrown off track if you enter a data centre that is full. Ask about current usage and predicted expansion capacity.

6              Physical security

Check on physical intruder security, such as biometrics, multi-point surveillance cameras, locked server cages and mantraps. Establish that state-of-the-art fire prevention, detection and suppression is in place; be confident that your systems are safe.

7              Data security

As mobile access becomes more important and the number of portable devices accessing a company’s resources increases, network security grows in importance. Request double factor access authentication, and ensure that network intrusion prevention systems are current.

8              Reliability and availability

What are the service level agreements for reliability and availability, and what evidence can be offered to show that these targets will be achieved? Is there a failover plan should the data centre itself become unavailable?

9              Support

Ensure that the outsourced offering includes the right level of support – immediate response, four hours, eight – and appropriate skills and certifications such as CCNA or MCSP to meet your business needs

10           Quality control

Is the data centre certified to SunTone, ISO or BS 7799 standards, with processes to eliminate concerns about the security of networks, data and physical machines?

Starting the data centre outsourcing conversation

These key points should be considered as the starting point for a conversation with the data centre team. For each business the ranking of the criteria may be different according to business priorities – for example, 24/7 operation may be more important than multiple connectivity.

Interxion is one of the leading data centre providers, offering carrier-neutral connectivity, full quality certification and some of the most advanced hosting facilities in Europe. For all of the top-ten questions, the Interxion answer is Yes. 

Anthony Foy is Group Managing Director of Interxion