If your business has high bandwidth, storage, and power requirements or needs highly secure, modular services, wholesale data center services are likely your best option.
Though the overall cost of your colocation service will undoubtedly be higher, you will appreciate benefits such as:
- Larger data center footprints with more scalability and expandability for growth
- More control over your power and telecommunications infrastructure
- Better utilization of your IT staff as opposed to paying the service provider to rack and stack servers
- Cost avoidance of building your own dedicated data center, with the “plug and play” benefits of leasing raised floor space, reliable cooling, and stable power.
Whether you are looking to offer retail colocation services to end-user customers or if you are the end-user customer yourself, wholesale data centers offer high availability for cloud applications, web hosting, and streaming media.
Why Buy Wholesale?
The companies involved in offering wholesale services are leaders in the space, including such providers as:
- Amazon Web Services
- Equinix
- Google Cloud Platform
- IBM SoftLayer
- Microsoft Azure
- Rackspace
These providers have invested heavily in their dark fiber and other elements of their telecommunications infrastructure.
Since they don’t have to focus on as much “hand holding” during the set-up phase of your data center module, they can spend more time ensuring better connectivity. They usually offer multiple connectivity providers, so if you are not happy with the performance or service levels of one provider, you have the option to make an easy transition to another.
Wholesale data centers also tend to be located in areas with more affordable power, top-notch telco lines, and government tax incentives for data center providers.
As a client of theirs, the savings realized through economies of scale can be beneficial.
The lines between retail and wholesale services are becoming either brighter or less defined depending on who you believe. Either way, wholesale power thresholds are dropping down to as low as 250 kW. Hence, the entry-level for end users is more achievable by companies not in the data center business themselves.
More Control and Lower Minimums
Companies that contract with wholesale providers can also have more control over their security appliances, such as firewalls and Intrusion Prevention Systems.
Instead of paying for security personnel or physical security devices, they benefit from their provider’s people and equipment.
Contracts for wholesale services also tend to have service-level agreements that are more negotiable and/or guarantee higher uptime.
Companies can also ensure more predictable traffic levels based on their own employees, partners, and customers instead of relying upon a retail provider with multiple demographics of users.
If your company has distributed locations across the country, contracting with a wholesale data center can get you access to data centers close to your other locations, which can reduce latency.
It requires multiple server pods or modules, but the performance benefits are such that the added cost can be rationalized.
And again, data centers are starting to offer wholesale services at lower thresholds, so a distributed infrastructure is becoming even more realistic with “wholo” services.
Have you contracted for wholesale services? Have you realized the benefits regarding connectivity performance, stability, or power availability? Tell us about it in the Comments section.
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