How To Choose A Boston Data Center

Customers in Boston often demand the very highest levels of service from their vendors. For most organizations, the most practical way to deliver this is to implement a Boston data center. Here is a quick guide to what you need to know.

Why choose a Boston data center?

Probably the most obvious reason for choosing a Boston data center is the fact that Boston is a major economic and business hub and the location of renowned financial, educational, and healthcare institutions. It’s also a convenient base from which to reach out into Massachusetts and potentially even neighboring states such as Rhode Island and Connecticut.

As you would expect from a state capital, Boston has excellent physical and digital infrastructure. In fact, Boston’s network connectivity is outstanding even by the standards of modern state capitals. Its standing as a global tech hub means that it has particularly robust and sophisticated connectivity infrastructure.

Boston also has a large pool of skilled workers who can cover all possible IT needs. Additionally, it has very few human or environmental hazards.

How to choose a Boston data center

The basic process of choosing a Boston data center is much the same as the basic process of choosing a data center in any other location. There are, however, some location-specific considerations.

Create a specification of your requirements

Your starting point for this is likely to be the type(s) of data center(s) you require. This will determine the split of responsibilities between you and the Boston data center vendor. Once you have determined this, you will be able to determine what you require from the facility and the vendor.

For example, if you’re looking for a colocation data center, then you will need a Boston data center with the technical capability of housing your equipment. This means you will need to know the conditions your equipment needs to operate. In particular, you will need to know its power requirements and optimal environmental conditions.

By contrast, if you’re using a managed-services or cloud data center, then you will be using vendor-supplied hardware. That means you’ll need to define the specifications of the hardware you’ll require and make sure that the vendor can support them.

Evaluate the Boston data center

Here are the five key points to check when evaluating a Boston data center.

Compliance and security: The compliance programs and/or data security standards a Boston data center can support will tell you a lot about their security standards. You should be able to get further details from the vendor. The vendor should also be able to explain their protocols for business continuity and disaster recovery.

Reliability: The standard measure of a data center’s reliability is its uptime guarantee. This is expressed as a percentage of its availability over a given period. These days, guarantees of close to 100% are standard. It’s not unusual for a data center to offer a 100% uptime guarantee. The guarantee should be assessed against the data center’s tier rating and historical performance data.

Infrastructure: You can expect literally any Boston data center to have access to excellent infrastructure. Even so, however, there will be variances in just how good it is. These will often be linked to a data center’s location. For example, if a data center is near a key network hub, then it will have a particularly good connection.

Flexibility: In terms of a data center facility, flexibility largely translates to customizability and scalability. With that said, a lot of the real-world flexibility of a data center actually depends on the caliber of the data center vendor. Essentially, it comes down to how important it is to them to keep their customers happy.

Cost and pricing structure: There are very few (if any) organizations that can afford to overlook headline costs. It is, however, important to remember that the pricing structure can be as important as the stated costs. It’s also vital that the costs are transparent. You should never have to worry about being stung by hidden fees.

Evaluate the Boston data center vendor

Any data center is a hugely complex facility that requires highly-skilled personnel to keep it running smoothly. In addition to people with technical skills, it requires people with management skills to hold everything (and everyone) together.

This means that it’s as important to evaluate the caliber of the Boston data center vendor as it is to evaluate the caliber of the Boston data center itself. As well as checking their technical credentials, look at their attitude to customer service. This is often key to a successful, long-term partnership.