subject: Colo In Los Angeles - The Growing Need For Colocation In Business [print this page] A colocation facility or center is a data center where equipment space and bandwidth are available for lease to retail customers. Los Angeles colocation facilities may provide space, power, cooling and physical security for the server, storage and networking equipment. Many companies primarily use colocation to put public Internet-facing servers such as websites, either done by a hoster or managed by the enterprises themselves. Beyond this, they may be used by some enterprises for disaster recovery. These services are usually provided by some telecom service providers or carrier-neutral facilities where there are a wide variety of network carriers to choose from.
These facilities may be colocated with the public peering points that may help make the Internet the network-of-networks. A colocation facility puts your equipment/application/service close to the core of the Internet from a connectivity, performance and network reliability point of view. There is a lot of competition at a carrier neutral facility to provide bandwidth as these facilities are given lots of fiber connectivity. This combination of competition and capacity brings down the price of bandwidth available at a colocation facility than the price almost anywhere else. Bandwidth rates may be as low as $1 - $2 per Gbps per month.
A colo in Los Angeles may offer inexpensive bandwidth. Being also close to the core of the Internet, it's possible to connect to other locations very inexpensively, very reliably and at fairly low latency. In terms of latency, they may also be close to large numbers of users/business connecting to the Internet. Though rack space is relatively expensive at such facilities, the small physical footprint of server virtualization enables enterprises to effectively take advantage of colocation facilities. So, colocation offers cheap bandwidth, a way to build inexpensive, reliable, stable and relatively low latency connectivity worldwide, and frequently offers low latency connectivity to enterprise locations.
All the equipments make the temperatures to rise making the place humid. So, air-conditioners are used to control the temperature. The modern approach to resolving these issues ask for controlling the air temperature and running the server components at manufacturer related level. The data centers are often audited for maintenance of standards and reliability levels, the benchmark being SAS 70. The tier system is looked after by Uptime Institute. As data is highly valuable in modern times, the colocation facilities employ high physical security levels and are guarded continuously. CCTVs are also employed. Each facility may employ its own security measure such as the employees escorting the customer, a PIN code or proximity card access, fingerprint recognition, voice recognition.
