– Shahid Javed, Colocation Product Marketing Programs Manager at RagingWire Data Centers, says: Dedicated Infrastructure for Colocation Customers

Enterprise customers who are searching for a data center for a 200kW or higher critical infrastructure, have a wide range of wholesale colocation providers to choose from. Besides deciding on the physical location to house their infrastructure, these customers must have some important questions to ask a colocation provider such as redundancy, power billing options, network connectivity, high density availability, scalability and services such as DCIM or remote hands. One of the biggest challenges that many of these enterprise customers face is deciding between the infrastructure delivery options that are available in the industry.

Most colocation providers follow any one of the two delivery models for providing infrastructure to wholesale customers: Shared or Dedicated. The traditional wholesale colocation design is based on dedicated infrastructure, where the customer is allocated a fixed infrastructure that maybe isolated from other customers. Dedicated infrastructure can be difficult and costly to scale beyond the initial allocation and usually comes with lower availability due to the small number of fault domains.

In a shared infrastructure colocation design, the customer is allocated a portion of the total infrastructure of the facility. Often, these shared elements are oversubscribed, relying on multiple customers not to reach or exceed their usage at the same time. Due to over-subscription of power, shared facilities can be less expensive, but more risky.

There is a third option called the Distributed Infrastructure Delivery Model that has the benefits of both shared and dedicated models and provides truly 100% availability.

RagingWire’s patented distributed redundancy model which is an enhancement of shared and dedicated infrastructure models. The load is distributed at the UPS and generator level across the facility, using a patented 2N+2 electrical design. Using this scalable system, RagingWire does not oversubscribe its infrastructure so customers are not at risk from the load or actions of other customers. This model also provides the highest level of provable availability in the industry, and it allows for a robust SLA for wholesale colocation: 100% Availability with no exclusions for maintenance. There is a white paper that can be downloaded from our website that will give you more details and also compares and identifies benefits and pitfalls of the three power delivery models and offer practical advice to businesses looking for wholesale colocation.