As a key player in the economy of the western, southwest, and mountain states, Denver is an obvious candidate as a location for a data center. With that in mind, here is a quick guide to what you need to know about choosing a Denver data center.
Choosing a Denver data center offers numerous advantages for businesses. Firstly, Denver’s geographical position in the center of the United States makes it an ideal hub for data center operations.
It also has a very benign climate with low humidity and a mild temperature range. This climate provides a natural advantage for data center cooling, contributing to energy efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Similarly, the city is known for its low risk of natural disasters. This reduces the potential risks to data center operations.
Here are the key points to consider when choosing a Denver data center.
It can be helpful to start by setting a budget for upfront and operational costs. Upfront costs include expenses related to infrastructure, equipment, and any customization needed to meet specific business requirements. Operational costs include maintenance, utilities, and any additional services required for optimal functioning.
If there’s any flexibility in your budget, then you can set a target figure and a stretch figure. The target figure is what you’d like to spend. The stretch figure is what you could spend if you had to.
Your choice of Denver data center needs to align with your broader goals and objectives of the organization. The clearer you can be about your needs and wants, the easier it will be for you to judge if a data center is a good fit for them. Understanding your priorities is important since you may not be able to find a data center that is a perfect fit in every way. You therefore have to be clear on what is most (and least) important to you.
When considering what you need from a Denver data center, remember to account for your future plans. When you come to do the cost analysis for a potential data center solution, you will need to consider its ability to accommodate future growth without a disproportionate increase in costs.
There are four main types of data centers. Here is an overview of them.
Enterprise data centers: These data centers are custom-built, owned, and operated by organizations and used for their internal computing needs. These solutions give organizations maximum control over their data center facility.
Colocation data centers: Businesses rent space within off-premises facilities that host infrastructure elements such as power supplies and cooling. Clients manage their own computing hardware and servers within the shared facility.
Managed services data centers: Deployed, managed, and monitored by third-party service providers, these data centers operate on a leasing model. This allows businesses to access data center features and functions without the need to invest in and manage their own infrastructure.
Cloud data centers: This represents an off-premises variation of a data center, offering leased and hosted infrastructure managed by a third-party provider. Businesses can access resources via the internet, providing scalability and flexibility.
If you need (or want) to comply with formal data security standards, then you will need your data center facility to support them. Even if you don’t, knowing a vendor can support key data security standards and frameworks (e.g. ISO 27001) is a very reassuring sign. It indicates they implement robust physical and digital security.
The quickest way to assess a data center’s reliability is to look at its tier rating. If this is satisfactory, you can then look at the vendor’s service guarantees and their historical performance data.
For most organizations, the main consideration is likely to be network connectivity. Data centers need to provide high-speed and reliable connectivity to meet the demands of modern business operations.
It’s also highly preferable if they have a carrier-neutral approach, allowing businesses to choose from multiple network service providers. Finally, having a Denver data center with multicloud support offers the flexibility needed to adapt to changing business requirements and take advantage of diverse cloud services.
In the real world, how important accessibility is to you is likely to depend on how often you are going to need to access your Denver data center solution. If you are planning to use third-party services for on-site work, then it may be sensible to choose a less accessible location. This may have better physical security due to being more challenging to access.
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