Setting up a business-grade network to service your customers, employees, and anyone else that your business may work with is a lot of work. There are a lot of possibilities to consider, and depending on the physical locations of your customers and employees there may also be a lot of distance to cover. Applications can easily be tied down if they are far enough from their customers, and if you are trying to service a customer in Argentina when your main network is in Canada, there will be latency issues. This is where colocation can come into play to help you to get IT closer to your target audience. Of course, there are other reasons to utilize colocation; you might not have international customers, but you might need to be in a data center for security or regulatory reasons. There is also the fact that data centers act as marketplaces for many ISPs, granting colocation customers access to the best connections available when it comes to serving up data.
The most traditional benefit to colocation is, of course, the benefit that having infrastructure in the same geographic area as your client can provide. The further away that the server gets from the customer, the higher the latency will go – it doesn’t matter who the provider is, as at the end of the day the internet can only travel so fast, and trying to travel across the US will take longer than traveling across the state or even the city. Even for large companies placing data centers in every major city services is cost-extensive, which is why colocation is such a popular solution in its place. For international markets, especially in markets where local IT infrastructure isn’t up to par with what is available in the US, it makes sense to use the nearest US city as the colocation site. Many of our customers use our Miami-based data centers to service clients in Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, and more for this reason – not only does our data center wind up being more cost effective than local solutions, but internet connectivity is superior as well because of the standards of our data center.
Our data center is also designed to be highly resilient, as we know that your applications need to be available at all times. Both power and internet are available in an N+1 configuration, which means that there is always an additional UPS or internet connection in place just in case a piece of hardware or cabling fails with the normal connection. This is how we are able to provide an SLA with 99.999% availability, and keep you running at all times. Of course, uptime isn’t the only benefit to being in a data center – we also have significant security in place to keep your hardware safe. Access to the datacenter is granted only with a successful fingerprint scan of authorized personnel who have a security badge, and the full facility is monitored by 24×7 security agents. Many regulatory agencies require this to be in place in addition to having data stored off-site, so our customers appreciate having these benefits in place.
Going back to the internet connectivity available in the data center, our optimized internet packages enable our customers to obtain the best possible connection with the lowest possible latency combined with the least amount of packet loss and jitter possible for client connections outside of the data center. This is done through proprietary techniques using our internal infrastructure as well as a blend of multiple ISPs to ensure that only the best possible connection is used. This is also a part of how we provide N+1 connectivity to the internet – if ISP A fails you can simply failover to ISP B/C/D/E/etc. immediately, keeping your customers and employees online.
To learn more about collocating to our data center space in Miami, please feel free to reach out to us by calling (305) 735-8098 option 2 or by emailing sales@vaultnetworks.com.