When touring a data center to bring your equipment in for colocation, it is important to understand just want the data center brings to the table. After all, anyone can bring you into a cool building with lots of computers humming and buzzing, but how do you really know that the data center is the right one for what you need to do in your business? Vault Networks has many customers, both old and new, who come to our data center daily, and these are some of the big things that have helped them to understand that our facility is right for them.
- What are the uptime expectations?
For business customers, it is important to have a data center that has a good record on uptime – after all, the internet doesn’t sleep, so your data center can’t rest either! Good indicators to look at are Tier ranking from the Uptime Institute as well as any security classifications such as SSAE II. We have discussed this in a lot more detail in a previous blog, but the questions are still good to ask. If your provider has any uptime reports from any 3rd parties, those might be good to request as well. We partner with CloudHarmony for our uptime reports, which are at 100% network availability for the last 30 days as of this writing.
- Is Data Center Infrastructure the main focus of the vendor?
There are many organizations that offer Data Center services, but it isn’t something that they really offer – to these companies, colocation in the data center is just an opportunity to sell telecommunications services, for example. This might mean that there are limitations to the network carriers that can be connected to within the facility. Our facility has an extensive network of carriers that our customers can connect to with our blended internet packages, and we fully encourage using our data center as a central location to conduct all of your internet-based business in Miami.
- Is there any way to get help with my equipment if I can’t get to it?
By the very nature of colocation, it is very likely that you might need to update hardware or install new peripherals, but you won’t be in the same city, state, or even country as your server! Because of this, it is important to have a team of experts that you can rely on for when those scenarios occur, and in that regard our team delivers. Our technical support departments takes calls and tickets 24x7x365 every day in order to assist our clients with the business that they need to have running smoothly at all times. If you need us to help out with your equipment, just let us know and we will make the arrangements to be your team in the data center to get the job done.
- (Bonus!) Does the data center allow you to tour the facility?
This might seem like a silly question, but not all colocation providers allow prospective customers to visit their facility – sometimes the reasons are due to security purposes, but other times it might be because there is something to hide. Vault Networks is happy to bring any prospective clients into our colocation data center during business hours so that one of our representatives can answer these questions and more to help you find the right way to take care of your business in the data center.
In case you can’t wait to take a look at our facilities, feel free to visit our online data center tour on our website. Of course, if you want to see the real deal, give us a call so that we can schedule an appointment and tour of our facility! To reach out to us, feel free to give us a call at (305) 735-8098 option 2 or by emailing sales@vaultnetworks.com.