The colocation business is quickly evolving and this is true for a New Jersey data center as well.
Although a lot of businesses still offer traditional Tier 1 colocation, more companies are starting to embrace managed services. To be honest, there is no comparison between traditional colocation and what you get with managed services. One of the major drivers of this trend is the fact that with managed services, you don’t need a significant amount of capital for hardware.
Evolving for the Cloud
As more companies adopt the cloud to run their operations, the managed services on offer will have to evolve to cater to the needs of cloud computing. Colocation across North America is now seeing a trend where colocation customers are demanding managed services for both physical and cloud environments.
So for the foreseeable future, you can expect managed services to play a crucial role at New Jersey data centers. Managed services are really attractive as colocation providers can easily step in to help drive cloud adoption and help incorporate cloud solutions. As the physical infrastructure becomes more heavily automated, data centers can focus more on extending their services further into the application stack. In other words, the future of managed services will reflect the automation of core IT delivery.
Colocation Centers in New Jersey
At the present time, there are 14 areas in the state of New Jersey with 49 colocation centers. The concentration of these data centers remains in Hudson County (24 data centers).
- Bridgewater
- Cranbury
- Edison
- Hudson County
- Morris County
- New Brunswick
- Newark
- Newton
- Pennsauken
- Piscataway
- Princeton
- South Brunswick
- Totowa
- Wall Township
Out of the 49 colocation centers in the state, only six companies have embraced managed services. Hudson County has the highest concentration with four data centers offering managed services. Although these numbers are quite small, expect it to grow rapidly with increased demand from the New York City financial hub right next door.
New Jersey Colocation with Managed Services
New Jersey data centers that offer managed services are as follows:
- MFX RFP (Hudson)
- CenturyLink NJ1 (Hudson)
- CenturyLink NJ2 (Hudson)
- QTS Jersey City (Hudson)
- CenturyLink NJ3 (Piscataway)
- Steel ORCA (Princeton)
Although cloud services are growing in popularity, a data center can’t afford to eliminate traditional managed services and dedicated hosting from their business. If they chose to follow this path, they would potentially be denying themselves of market share that is still very much alive.
So although it might be less expensive not to offer managed services it’s important to have those options. So expect data centers to offer both traditional Tier 1 colocation as well as managed services in the near future.
Further, a company operating a data center in New Jersey is also aware that it needs to maintain managed services for web-based application hosting and enterprise application hosting which require managed services to deal with the underlying cloud infrastructure.
It makes sense when you investigate the various types of applications that clients require and how many applications need to work together. As a result hybrid computing will be a standard feature at data centers across the country.
Have you been using managed services from a data center in the Garden State? What drove you to choose managed services? Please share your experience in the Comments box below.
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