Considerations When Migrating to a New Colocation Data Center

Your IT infrastructure and data should first and foremost be safe. When migrating to a data center you want to make sure that your new colocation provider has the right facilities and security measures. In this article we’ll review three key aspects that will assist in safeguarding your business and future proof your growth.

Is your new data center colocation environment truly secure and compliant?

When deploying your IT infrastructure and storing your data in a multi-tenant data center, you want to be sure that your systems and data are safe with your colocation provider. Does it have a layered thus redundant design? When it comes to European data center operators, does your colocation provider have its physical security developed in accordance with the ‘shell model’ guidelines stemming from the European EN 50600 standard?

In the United States, an indicator for the quality of a colocation data center’s security is ensured through TIA-942. TIA (Telecommunications Industry Association) is laying out the specifications for data centers, ranging from single-tenant business data centers to multi-tenant colocation data centers. It includes everything from site placement to security, telecommunications, fire protection, and other requirements.

For governmental organizations and businesses handling sensitive, confidential data but also for businesses with demanding applications and mission critical activities, you might want your colocation provider to be third-party confirmed compliant with the international ISO/IEC 27001 standard. The standard established by the ISO (International Organization for Standardization) and IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) is specifying and accrediting a data center’s management system and processes for information security management. With this certification in place, you will be assured that your colocation provider can control potential information security risks through a predefined framework of business processes.

With regard to ecommerce activities or other colocated IT infrastructure that handles payment data, you would probably also like to know if your data center provider is compliant with PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard). Developed in cooperation with credit card companies like MasterCard, Visa, and American Express, this international PCI DSS standard ensures that the colocation data center is a safe environment for processing, storing or transmitting payment data.

What aspects of the colocation environment are energy efficient and sustainable?

IT infrastructures usually consume quite a lot of power. For various colocation clients, it is therefore highly relevant to know whether the data center infrastructure has been set up in an energy-efficient manner. This is particularly important for government organizations, but sustainability also plays an important role for enterprises when choosing a colocation data center for housing their IT infrastructure. Data center operators therefore have the task to provide data center management for colocated applications as energy efficiently as possible.

It is good from an environmental perspective, but an (energy-)efficiently designed data center is also good for the performance and stability of your IT infrastructure. Equally important, it benefits the wallet of both the data center operator and you as a colocation customer.

A Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) value may provide the necessary guidance. Older data centers have a PUE value that generally lies between 1.8 and 2.0. Newer data centers that make use of intelligent data center architectures and the latest technologies are now able to realize a PUE value of approximately 1.07 to 1.35. For data centers with a PUE value of 1.15, like the ones operated by Worldstream, it means that for every 100 Watts of power consumed by the server, network, and storage equipment, 15 Watts of additional power is required for the data center environment in which the equipment is located.

In addition to the PUE value, a periodic and independently accredited ISO 14001 certification can also provide guidance on the sustainability of a colocation environment, guaranteeing the end-to-end environmental management of a data center organization.

What level of engineering support services does your colocation facility have?

Selecting a (new) colocation provider is only the first step in establishing your IT infrastructure in a colocated data center environment. What about the migration itself? Does the colocation provider have a project management team with certified and experienced experts available to support your in-house or third-party IT administration team with knowledgeable data center expertise?

The response times of a data center’s support engineers might also be of importance, not only when migrating your IT infrastructure to the colocation premises but especially when it’s all up and running. It can help to not just rely on fancy words from a provider and checking sender-oriented statements on a supplier’s website. Instead, you may ask for client references and the ability to give them a call. After all, it’s your IT infrastructure thus business continuity with which you entrust the colocation provider.

Colocating your IT infrastructure at Worldstream’s data centers

In light of the escalating power grid congestion in Amsterdam, the location of your colocation matters as well. Worldstream’s facilities in the Westland, close to the Rotterdam/The Hague region offers a viable solution. According to data released by Netbeheer Nederland, the issue of power availability does not exist in this region. With robust power availability and near-zero latency connections to key internet hubs, businesses can achieve scalable, secure, and continuous IT operations without the constraints faced in Amsterdam. On top of that Worldstream runs on 100% renewable energy, generated from Dutch wind energy, which makes the data centers highly sustainable.

Worldstream was founded in 2006 by childhood friends who shared a passion for gaming. Worldstream has evolved into an international IT infrastructure (IaaS) provider. Our mission is to create the ultimate digital experience together with you and our partners. Worldstream's offers data center colocation services from its company-owned data centers in the Netherlands. We aim to simplify IT leaders' lives by providing round-the-clock 24/7 colocation support, with an average response time of just 7 minutes.

As an IaaS solutions provider with a global backbone, Worldstream offers ample opportunities for IT service providers and MSP's alike to professionally shape a portfolio for both upcoming and enterprise IT architectures. These solutions are building blocks for emerging service providers. For example, Worldstream offers secure cloud on-ramps from the data center to well-known American public cloud providers (e.g. Microsoft Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud). This variety of infrastructure solutions are perfect for integrating managed services, where colocation plays a significant role. These solutions include private cloud, file storage, block storage, object storage, and colocation. Also, our aforementioned proprietary WS Cloud public cloud platform, powered by Virtuozzo open-source technology, provides a cost-effective European cloud alternative.

To learn more about Worldstream’s data center colocation services, visit the colocation page here.

You might also like:

• Power grid congestion in Amsterdam: Rotterdam emerges as colocation hub.
• The difference between bare metal cloud and dedicated servers.
• The benefits of integrating managed services with data center colocation.

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