In mid September, Hurricane Ike struck a major blow to Houston, the nation’s fourth largest city and the global center of the energy industry. Much of the city was without power for weeks, leaving Houston’s business hubs in the dark or surviving off generator power. In the midst of all the chaos, one nondescript building just a few miles outside of downtown proved to be a fortress for more than a few companies and their data centers. This building is the home of CyrusOne, a Tier 4 data center facility providing corporate co-location services. Inside this building, it was like Ike never happened; not a single customer felt so much as a blip from the storm.

CyrusOne’s continuous availability guarantee is one reason so many companies co-locate their critical business applications there. According to CEO David Ferdman, there are numerous reasons why companies enter into a data center co-location arrangement, but for CyrusOne customers, uptime is everything. In this newsletter, we look at the various benefits of outsourcing data center operations to a co-location provider.

The facility

Co-location allows an organization to run its business applications without having to worry about the issues and costs associated with building and maintaining an onsite data center. Instead, the co-location provider is responsible for providing a facility with secure floor space, cooling, fire suppression, primary power, backup power, telecommunications and networking, physical access controls, and everything else associated with continuous uptime and reliability. For many companies, regardless of size, it just makes sense to let someone else worry about all the physical aspects of creating a secure and stable computing environment.

For example, Ferdman points out that CyrusOne’s Houston facility is located in a reinforced building meant to withstand 170 mile-per-hour winds. The building is elevated to safeguard it from Houston’s infamous flooding, and it has redundant power and telecommunication sources. There are multiple backbone providers delivering network diversity. The building even has its own water source separate from municipal facilities for emergency situations.

The average business couldn’t begin to build a data center that approaches these specifications for a physical facility. “It’s very expensive to build a data center,” says Ferdman. “Our customers can leverage our investment in all the redundant systems rather than buy and install them for themselves.”

Linda Musthaler is a principal analyst with Essential Solutions Corporation.