The market factors driving colocation in recent years will no doubt continue in 2022, but industry insiders anticipate a further boost from a diversified customer base and technologies like artificial intelligence. Since building and running data centers are complicated, colocation has become a preferred alternative offering several advantages beyond only time and money savings.
Colocation is trending fast and furiously. For example, colocation services make up about 40% of the entire data center capacity in Germany, and the number is growing.
Here are the top colocation developments and trends you need to watch this year.
1. High availability
When IT systems fail, corporate operations halt, and customers can no longer access online or other digital offerings. Hence, organizations rely on high IT availability to prevent the related revenue and reputation losses that come with this failure.
Data center providers lay the groundwork for this with various technical and administrative safeguards, such as redundant cooling systems, effective fire protection systems, and a dependable emergency power supply. Comparable availability standards are uncommon for businesses to attain in their own data centers. Today, colocations are widely available with remarkable service support and good benefits. As a result, more and more enterprises are opting for colocation to avoid availability issues.
2. Professional operations
Very few businesses can promise that a data center will run without interruptions all day and night. The majority work with low staffing levels and are frequently unable to respond quickly in the event of issues due to a lack of trained workers.
To operate and safeguard the facilities, colocation providers have both an adequate number of highly qualified people and decades of tested and continuously improved concepts to safeguard and ensure the smooth working of the facilities.
3. To shrink the colocation footprint
The colocation footprint is getting smaller due to several market forces combining. For starters, traditional enterprise customers, small enterprises, and startups all increasingly include colocation as a part of their hybrid IT plans.
We see that smaller enterprises are going for smaller installations, which service providers facilitate. These installations have built-in power and core networking, which are as small as quarter cabinets.
4. AI Optimization
The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) across industries has sparked a new customer interest in adopting colocation facilities designed for the environmental demands of GPUs (Graphics Processing Units). The fundamental components of compute servers, including GPUs and variants like data processing units (DPUs) and infrastructure processing units (IPUs), are evolving from technical marvels. This is driving the demand for data centers that are specifically designed to support the amount of power and cooling of these systems.
5. Greater connectivity
In addition to having numerous redundant connections to the internet and major internet nodes, colocation data centers frequently have direct connections to the top cloud, telecom network, and IT service providers. Organizations find it easy to adopt SaaS solutions and deploy hybrid cloud concepts due to the guaranteed bandwidth and latencies. For internal data centers to reach this level of connection, excavation work to run new wires is often required.
Conclusion
A data center takes vast knowledge and complicated engineering to build and run. Even upgrading or growing an existing facility can be exceedingly expensive and time-consuming. With colocation, businesses are now taking advantage of the high availability and superior connections of specialized service providers while avoiding financial risk. Even huge cloud providers, who mainly rely on colocation, are leveraging the advantages it offers.
Netlabs Global is a leader in providing cloud and IT infrastructure services to help organizations successfully and effortlessly enable digital transformation. Talk to our experts today to learn more about how our colocation and data center solutions can help transform your business.
