Your data centre space is critical to your business, so choosing the right data centre is key. When you are considering whether you should move your data centre space or not, it’s important to identify your “nice-to-haves” and your “need-to-haves”. Here, we list what Technimove advises our clients to look for when choosing a new data centre space.
Locality
Data centre location is normally top of the list. Even if you’re taking a managed service from your data centre provider, clients still want the data centre to be located close enough that staff can access it – this usually means that it’s within circa 50 miles of the office.
Connectivity
It’s critical that the right carriers are present in the data centre that you decide on. Often due to low latency needs, our clients will look for new data centre space that can offer them what their business demands.
Power
This is an ever-increasing factor now. With hardware needing more, and facilities having less, finding a data centre that can meet your power needs is not a given.
Careful consideration should be given to what your current and future needs are, so checking with the data centre provider that they can meet those requirements is important.
Financials
You have your top tier data centres, such as Equinix, Digital Realty Trust and Cyrus One, who offer an amazing service and seemingly have locations everywhere. These 2 factors might be top of your list, and you will look no further. However, these come at a cost.
You might need space for test and dev, or you are a smaller organisation who simply don’t have this kind of budget allocated to data centre space. Regardless, at some point, the commercials play a part in all data centre decisions, be that at the beginning of your search or at the end.
Multi-site
Many of our clients will chose a data centre based on their ability to offer a service in the cities, countries or regions that they operate. If you have agreed terms with a data centre (which isn’t a short or simple process) then the time and effort in duplicating that, each time you open a new datacentre, is inhibitive.
For many of our clients, it makes sense to choose a data centre provider that either has their own data centres in multiple locations, or they rent space with other data centres providers.
Commonly, the likes of Global Switch, Lumen and CenturyLink offer space for other data centres to sub-let. There are only a handful of true global data centre providers. When we say “global”, we look at the common markets, these being North America, Asia, and Europe. The likes of Equinix, Telehouse, NTT and Digital Reality Trust all fall into this category.
Space
Can the data centre provide you with the footprint that you need? This is a fundamental requirement that can often not be met by many of the city centre facilities. Again, consideration needs to be paid to future plans as well. One of the most common reasons we relocate a client’s data centre is because the data centre cannot accommodate their planned expansion.
Of course, there are many other factors to consider, such as a data centre’s financial standing, previous service levels and even the ownership, however, we hope that we have been able to provide a high-level overview of the key points that you should consider.
Choosing your new data centre space and planning your data centre migration is challenging. Contact Technimove to see how we can help you navigate through this process – let’s start with a conversation.