Categories
Share

Don’t Get Stuck in Carrier Hotel California: How Your Data Center Provider Can Help You Check out And Leave Outages Behind

May 13, 2021

Lightedge

Author

server

While the popular Eagles hit has a hauntingly beautiful feel to it, if you’re utilizing one of the many colocation providers who are reliant upon carrier hotels—or worse, keeping your mission-critical IT on-prem, you’re probably not getting any cool trumpet solos to go with your numerous outages. It will, however, haunt you for weeks or years to come. Staying on-premises or reliant on a carrier hotel or a less-than-stellar provider can do irreparable damage to your company’s infrastructure and reputation.

If you feel your head going heavy and your sight going dim as you stress about your mission-critical IT, you may want to consider choosing a partner that intentionally builds pathways around carrier hotels so you’re protected, redundant and ready for whatever comes your way.

 Be Prepared for More than Cool Wind in Your Hair

A carrier hotel is a site where various network service providers converge and are interconnected. Given the location of many carrier hotels, they’re susceptible to weather-related outages. What was once a prime example of redundancy, carrier hotels are no longer the shimmering light they once were. Many of the carrier hotels in major cities are centrally located, on high floors of aging buildings and highly-susceptible to weather-related outages.

For example, the carrier hotel in Des Moines is on a high floor of one of the tallest buildings in town. For most of the year, this is not a big deal, but Iowa gets high winds, tornadoes, snowstorms and the occasional derecho, all of which have the potential to affect power supply or even the structural integrity of the building. A good colocation provider builds its network around these high-risk structures as well as locates their own physical facilities out of harms’ way so their customers will never be affected by Mother Nature’s revenge.

Don’t Be a Prisoner of Your Own Device

The risks associated with vendor lock-in are key concerns for many colocation customers. While some facilities may seem flashy on the surface and pull you in with promises of being everything you’ve ever wanted. Six months in your needs change, you find out the provider you selected is not all they’re cracked up to be, but you can’t risk getting out. Many organizations find themselves stuck with a sub-par provider and no plan for improvement, therefore their larger objectives and goals for growth stagnate.

In this situation, it’s important you’re not actively working against yourself. Before you look for a provider, do your own due diligence when it comes to your company’s forecasted growth and tech needs. As you discuss your future with your prospective colocation partner, they should be able to offer a certain level of flexibility with transitional options for services you need now versus in the future, so you’re getting the most bang for your buck. For example, you may pay for only the energy you use for the first several months before your growth catches up to your projections.

Find the Passage Back to The Place You Were Before

The best data center providers will build redundancy into every element of what they do. If they’re worth their salt, they will be touting anything and everything from change management protocol like ISO 20000-1 to basic failover procedures during your buying process. The documentation and processes

customers with these types of colocation partners will often say, “What a nice surprise,” when they find out they likely experience failovers to other networks that are so seamless that they never even noticed they occurred. Colocation providers like Lightedge have failovers to new networks that are set to happen with absolutely no human intervention needed, so even if one provider or carrier hotel goes down in the middle of the night, you’re immediately switched to a provider who isn’t.

Programmed to Receive

Let’s face it, some colocation providers aren’t ready to kill the beast that is your expanding workload, which is why scalability should be a key talking point when you’re meeting with prospective providers. How quickly can they adjust to your needs for space, bandwidth or connectivity will matter, especially if you’re looking for a long-term partnership. The faster they can adjust, the more value they provide to your organization.

This is a huge consideration for the folks who still keep all their IT in-house. When you think about the cost of doing this on-premises, it’s easy to see the value of colocation. If you were looking to scale up your IT, you’d have lots of wait time for the team to drive to your facility, any potential downtime you might experience during the installation and having limited space for backups in the event something should go awry.

Still Those Voices Are Calling from Far Away

As we move forward with our dispersed workforce, it’s more important now than ever to maintain the highest level of security for your mission-critical IT. And with the continued popularity of remote work, you’re probably seeing an impact on your IT when it comes to a bare-bones staff attending to it at any given moment.

Travel restrictions, outbreaks, and increases in data from remote endpoints make remote hands offerings from reliable colocation providers all the more attractive because it’s a way to future proof (or pandemic-proof) your organization’s IT. With how quickly remote hands workers can support your mostly-remote workforce, communication with them can feel more like voices down the corridor than emails or calls spanning hundreds of miles.

Lightedge Helps You Check Out Any Time You Like—And Actually Leave Your IT Woes Behind

If your current IT setup has you running for the door, Lightedge is here to help you meet the uptime and physical security needs your organization requires without a large capital spend or extreme vendor lock-in. With our team of experts working alongside your team, we can take the guesswork out of keeping your mission-critical resources on at a price that makes sense.

As a top-tier colocation services provider, we deliver a high level of availability and reliability through secure, certified data centers and dedicated staff onsite. Our customized and scalable services keep you in the driver’s seat, whether you need a rack, cage, or custom suite now or at any time in the lifecycle of your business. Let’s set up a call today to get you back to enjoying your free time without worrying about your uptime—this is a partnership you won’t want to check out on.

 

Related posts