The Straightforward Guide On What Colocation Is and Its Benefits

Malaysia now has over 31 million people. 67.7% of them are Internet users.

In this post, I'm going to cover everything you need to know about Colocation and how to use Colocation to benefit your business.

Colocation is essentially space in a data centre that you rent for your servers to benefit from data centre infrastructure.

By the end, you'll know more about Colocation than most business owners, about taking your online service from great to spectacular.

Let's get started.

What is Colocation?

The first thing you need to figure out about Colocation is a clear simple meaning or definition of Colocation.

Colocation is data centre space which is available for rent.

If the goal for you is to have your servers deliver world class results. Your servers should be placed in an environment (within a data centre) that has facilities to deliver world class results.

For example, you need information fast for a client who wants to work with you. And your servers should perform at an equal pace or quicker than you so that you are able to provide world class service to your clients.

Key takeaway: It's important for your business to deliver fast.

There are a few reasons for this.

First, if you can save some time through speed, you'll be able to do and deliver more for your business.

The biggest benefit of speed is if you are speaking with a potential client who is interested to buy, you'll be able to sell more effectively. When your sales pitch is delivered without interruption, it gives incentive to buyers when they are making a decision to buy.

For instance, imagine if you were interested to buy a new service or product and was doing research.

Wouldn't you miss out on those who are slow to respond, because someone else was first to sell to you?

"That's because speed is very important in selling, and is one of the key components to better sales conversions."

The second reason is that it makes your business easier to work with.

One of the main reasons why clients don't buy from you is because there isn't a sense of urgency.

If you are able to act and communicate quickly on information your buyer is interested to learn, it is more likely that you are able to convert a sale.

How does Colocation benefit your business?

So far we've covered what is Colocation.

However, what's arguably more important, is figuring out how Colocation can benefit your business.

After all you only need to get a small slice of a data centre's power to see exponential results for your services.

First, using Colocation is an inexpensive way for you to benefit from high connection speeds (bandwidth).

Second you would significantly reduce any delay in service delivery because of higher reliability.  For example, power supply has been carefully implemented into the infrastructure to make sure your servers are always turned on.

Third, there is a lower risk of someone unnecessarily physically accessing your servers. Your servers are secured with available options such as CCTV monitoring and lockable cabinets.

Conclusion

If you've allocated funds to buy servers, install them in a data centre to maximise its potential. It should help your business to deliver the world class results your clients demand for.

However, your servers can't just maintain themselves. For example, you might need more computing power (better RAM) to service a growing customer list.

You need to make sure your servers continue to have the best hardware and software you need it to have to service your growing business.

After all, the goal that you should be focused on is to provide world class services to your clients.

From reading this post, you now know everything you need to know about Colocation. So get out there and find a reliable one!

Do you already have a Colocation? What have you found to be the best strategies to install and maintain your Colocation?

Read More

What is Colocation?

Colocation is the practice of housing your servers and devices in a professional datacenter in order to access the benefits of greater bandwidth, lower latency, specialist services and systems, constant security advanced infrastructure, economies of scale, and a bunch of other benefits.

As the demands of the world increase, technologies grow to become more extensive and sophisticated. Constructing or adding to a proprietary, private datacenter becomes a commercially difficult (unless, perhaps, for the larger corporations that have plenty of dough to splash)

Greater resilience to disaster, malicious attacks, greater savings in costs, increases time flexibility as a convenience of service that is immediately on hand. A logical argument for colocation as a positive strategy for many businesses.

What are Colocation Services?

Colocation services are offered by datacenters equipped and configured to allow secure client access to private servers. Colocation services include:

1. Leasing server cabinets and cages
2. Connecting to an ISP's network and physical infrastructure
3. Monitoring server status.

Each cabinet and cage is securely locked and inaccessible to other colocation clients. 

Colocation services let clients take advantage of datacenter infrastructure, while maintaining control over their servers. The benefits colocation customers enjoy are:

1. Environmental control (temperature, humidity, and filtration)
2. Fire suppression systems
3. Redundant power sources, and uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) backup
4. Large capacity quality bandwidth
5. Around-the-clock physical security
6. Monitoring and technical services (storage, backups, firewall, and DDoS attack mitigation)

Using colocation services is an effective way for your business to achieve continuity, scalability and minimal network latency, while maintaining healthy costs, and at the same time having complete control over the physical server, operating system, and applications.

EVERWORKS is Malaysia's leading Datacenter Hosting Service Provider and Datacenter Hosting Solution. EVERWORKS houses over 200 Dedicated and Colocation Servers in World-Class Datacenters across Malaysia. EVERWORKS provides you with all the benefits of colocation hosting along with a flexible 'priority switch' to any EVERWORKS servers to maximize the best network blueprint at no extra costs (contact EVERWORKS for more detailed information).

Find out more or start colocation hosting with EVERWORKS.

Referenced from PEER 1

Read More

Benefits of Colocation Hosting

Colocation is the practice of housing your servers and devices in a professional datacenter in order to access the benefits of greater bandwidth, lower latency, technical services and systems, constant security, advanced infrastructure, economies of scale, and a bunch of other benefits. 

Further reading: What is Colocation Hosting?

Here are 8 compelling reasons to consider colocation hosting:

1. Power Redundancy

Backups. Essential to any business, but costly to own. Colocation hosting reduces the cost of expensive redundant servers to businesses.

2. On-site Specialists and Troubleshooting

When something goes wrong,you can't access your data and when your IT guy is on a vacation, what do you do? Colocation hosting ensures that there are always technical support specialists ready (one phone call away) at all times to get you back up and running.

3. Network reliability

Demands for constant connection drives businesses with the need on network reliability to ensure that their business continuity online is maintained. Datacenters provide 100% uptime, but with heavy costs involved, and colocation makes network reliability more affordable. 

4. Security and Data Protection. 

Security is always an issue, and with increasing security threats companies are more concerned with maintaining a secure environment. Colocation facilities generally offer key card entry, cabinet locks and surveillance to better manage security.

5. Bandwidth

Colocation hosting provides Internet Service Provider (ISP) level Internet access that allows smooth network operations over a strong bandwidth, that fulfills extensive requirements, and complex applications.

6. Cost Savings

Any of the above requires a good amount of investments. Why build something with such heavy initial investments when all you need to do is pay a simple 'utility bill' monthly to enjoy all of the benefits above with Colocation Hosting.

7. Location benefits

Infrastructure and hardware is vulnerable to dust, electricity damage, overheating, and a host of other risks. Facilities require maintenance to avoid critical issues like this. Colocation hosting mitigates such risks and provides you with a peace of mind.

8. Scalability

Is there a sudden increase in computing requirements or a drastic drop in computing requirements/ Instead of having to hire - or fire - new staff or purchase more equipment (or leave unused equipment around) you can just make a call to a Colocation Hosting Service Provider to scale according to your needs.

---

Host locally, in Malaysia, to enjoy the benefits of geographic positioning that will enable the majority of your local traffic to be effectively maximized.

EVERWORKS is Malaysia's leading Colocation Hosting Provider and Server Colocation Services Provider. EVERWORKS provides servers for your business to rid of hefty hardware investments and costly time of set-up & managing hardware. Find out more or start colocation hosting with EVERWORKS.

Referenced from Sterling, Contegix | Photo by Sivaserver

Read More

What is our Ratio of Oversea Upstream in Hybrid Network?

Due to the good respond in our previous 'Review' of Hybrid Bandwidth System, and a lot of people asking us on how our Hybrid is actually working or managing the incoming and outgoing oversea traffic for these servers hosted under the Hybrid network. Actually, there is a policy in managing this network to ensure our clients's oversea traffic are being well taken care. In short, our policy is 80:20 Ratio.

All our Hybrid Bandwidth System is being configured with this ratio configuration to ensure the clients are treating fairly. For example, if you are subscribed to 1 Mbps of our Hybrid Bandwidth, mean you are getting 1 Mbps dedicated bandwidth from our MYIX pool, and all your International access to your servers are managed from the shared bandwidth pool, where the shared bandwidth pool is configured with 80:20 ratio of our total subscription of MYIX network.

How this 80:20 Ratio Works? 
For example, if we have total dedicated 50 Mbps of MYIX subscription, then we will have 20 Mbps dedicated of International bandwidth in placed.


Will my customers experience slow access to my servers? 
Yes. This maybe happened when the shared bandwidth of International bandwidth is full. When this is happened and you are based in Malaysia, then you will not experience the slow connection.

Read More

Report: 69% of Plan Passenger Use Smartphone or Tablet During Flights

APEX (The Airline Passenger Experience Association) and CEA (Consumer Electronics Association) has recently join conducted an interesting survey on American airline passenger, and they found out that 69% of them will use their personal electronic devices such smartphone or tablet – during flights.

Doug Johnson, VP of technology policy at CEA, said: "Airline passengers have come to rely on their smartphones, tablets and e-Readers as essential travel companions. Understanding the attitudes and behaviors of passengers that are using electronic devices while traveling will help the FAA make informed decisions." Four in ten passengers (40%) would like to use their devices during all phases of flight, including take-off and landing. With 28%, smartphones are the most commonly used devices during flights, followed by laptops on 25%, tablets on 23%, MP3 players on 23% and e-readers on 13%. 

Meanwhile, we also found out another interest figure on their survey, that 59% of passengers will always turn their devices completely off when requested, 21% of passenger will switch their devices to 'Flight Mode' or 'Plane Mode', while 5% of them will just turn their devices completely off the entire journey. 

As we know this report is being conducted to understand the attitudes and behaviors of American passengers, but I think many Asia or even Malaysian passengers will have the similar attitudes like what stated in this report. Meanwhile, the steady growth of budget airlines (or no-frills airline) in Asia market such as AirAsia.com, has changed the attitudes and behaviors of Asia passengers during their flights. Most of the passenger will actually their own devices such smartphone or tablet – during flights.

After reviewed on this report, we at EVERWORKS.com are strongly believe that mobile content business will be a next biggest business in Asia market. Hence, hosting of mobile content will definitely play an very important role in making sure all these mobile contents are delivering to mobile devices with good and stable connection. EVERWORKS.com’s Colocation facility gives you more than just state-of-the art security and fail-safe provisions – we give you the direct connection to one of the Asia’s largest, next-generation fiber-optic networks. 

Read More

European & US companies love Cloud Computing! But why Malaysian prefer on Hybrid Colocation?

Recently, I have came across a interesting study report that conducted by Manchester Business School (MBS) and Rackspace Hosting, and their research topic is about the impact of cloud computing on today's businesses. In summary of the report, on average, moving to the cloud computing saves a company around RM1,275,000 (or £255,000) every year or RM106,250 (or £21,250) every month.

Dr Brian Nicholson of the MBS said "The survey - which involved questioning 1,300 firms across the UK and the US - showed the benefits of cloud computing are being felt by many organisations, as 83% of firms that have adapted to this way of working have saved money by doing so. Meanwhile, 40% of companies in the UK indicated that the use of the cloud had helped their organisation to grow, with 56% using the money they are saving through this strategy to invest in other areas of their business."

Let's talk about this report for a minute, from my point of view, this reports is still conducted in US and UK, and of course it's more applicable for their countries. From the amount of what Cloud Computing can save for the companies have to tally with the amount of IT budget that average a European and US companies spent every year. Image if Cloud Computing can save RM1.2mil  or 50% of the company's IT budget, mean the company's default IT budget is RM2.4mil. 

In Malaysia, although not many of SME (Small & Medium Enterprise) company will allocate a million dollars as their IT budget annually, but the awareness of Cloud Computing has always come into their future plan to improve their current IT infrastructure, or plan to cut down their maintenance cost. Currently, many of SME companies are slowly moving their front-end or less important servers (such as web servers, file servers, email servers, and etc.) to cloud servers, while still maintain most of their critical servers (like database servers) with colocation hosting model. Usually, we will define such hosting model as Hybrid Colocation model. 

SO, why Hybrid Colocation hosting is still more popular in Malaysia? Or why IT managers here are more preferable to Hybrid Colocation hosting? From our interview with some existing clients, we noticed many of the IT person-in charge are still worry to migrate of the existing data or software, but willing to consider in converting its front-end server like web and email server into cloud computing. Many businesses have elements in their traditional environments that they are unable to move to a virtualised or cloud environment. So Hybrid Co-location solutions is always their first move into the cloud computing, that putting both allow  virtual and physical hardware together.

Read More

What is our Colocation Power Usage Policy?

Power is one of the largest expenses in running a datacenter, and of course datacenter can easily make loss or close shop if improper manage of their power policy. Today, you can notice that almost every hosting provider in Malaysia are now implementing such  policy in controlling power usage for their colocation solutions (mainly also because datacenter in Malaysia have started to bill for additional power and limit the power allocation. Last time some just give no limit!).  

In fact, Power has become one of the key points in datacentre colocation, even more so than space. For colocation market, Power Usage Policy (PUP) is only applicable to Multiple Colocation solution, as Single Colocation solution is only giving one power point for one server. For colocation market, Power Usage Policy (PUP) is only applicable to Multiple Colocation solution, as Single Colocation solution is only giving one power point for one server. 

If you have gone through some web hosting provider for Multiple Colocation, and I guess you may seem some specification terms like 'Power Allocation' with 0.4kW for 10U Colocation or 0.7kW for 21U (Half Rack), or 0.7kW for 42U (Full Rack). Meaning to say, you are giving this such of power for your colocation every month, and you will be charge 'extra' if exceeded the limit. Currently, the market rate for power is between RM0.68 to RM0.75 per kWh (where this is very much depend on the datacenter building & infrastructure companies such as AIMS). From our survey, most of the colocation providers are putting this cost back-to-back to their clients). 

But honestly, how many of you really know how to count if exceeded the quota? Let me use one scenario to explain on this.   

"Our default power allocation for Full Rack colocation is 1.5kW (which is a standard practice in market). Assumethat you are estimating about 3kW monthly to support all your servers, then you need additional 1.5kW power with additional of RM0.68/kWh. So how much is 1.5kW? 

1.5kWx 24 hours x 30 days x RM 0.68/kWH = RM 734.40

In summary, we are concluded the power usage formula like this: 

<Total Usage in kW> x 24 hours x 30 days x <Cost of Power>

Like I mentioned earlier, most of the colocation providers will apply the same power cost that vendor charged them back to their colocation clients, so you can roughly know their cost to their vendor on power, as well as to predict their margin in market. 

Power Usage Policy (PUP) for Shared Rack Colocation: 

As we know, Power Usage Policy is only applied to Multiple Colocation solutions such as 10U (Quarter Rack), 21U (Half Rack), 42U (Full Rack) and etc. Most of the server racks in EVERWORKS are only installed with one power meter to measure its power usage for each different rack, as well as to configure with 1.5kW as our default power usage allocation. That's mean we will be allocating 0.04kW (1.5kW /  37U) for each colocation 'U'. As we know, one full rack has 42U of colocation space, then why we divide by 37U in this formula? This is because every shared rack that designed for Multiple Colocation will take up 4U space to install the tray. Hence, we can't bundle this 4U space into our client's bill.

Implementation of our Shared Power Usage Policy is just like how we managing our Shared Hosting servers, all available resources within the server and network will be shared among all existing web hosting clients. For this Shared Power Usage Policy, we are equally sharing the default of power allocation of 1.5kW. E.g. if you are subscribed to 10U Multiple Colocation, then you will get 0.40kW (10 x 0.04kW = 0.0394kW) of power allocation.

Your next question will be, how do we 'share' the additional charges if the rack has exceed the limit of 1.5kW? Just simple, we will share the exceeded power usage among the existing colocation clients under the rack with according to their occupancy space. E.g. assume that a rack has hit 2.0kW end of the month, that mean the total exceeded power usage is only 0.5kW (2.0kW - 1.5kW), or 0.013kw per U. If you are subscribed to 10U Multiple Colocation, then you will be responsible for 0.13kW, which is equal to RM63.70  (0.13kW x RM490).

Read More

What is EVERWORKS's Hybrid Bandwidth System?

EVERWORKS is among the 1st Datacenter Hosting Provider (DHP) in Malaysia, who deployed the Hybrid Bandwidth System that allow our customers to customize their bandwidth pattern – either to focus on local or international bandwidth. Today, a lot of web hosting companies and datacenter providers already configured such bandwidth system as their main bandwidth system that packaged to all their products, and of course it can make your package look more price competencies than who are still bundling with oversea upstream providers. 


EVERWORKS’s Hybrid Network is designed for our datacenter hosting clients who need to serve more Malaysian traffic than international visitors. Hence, a lot of our customer who are colocating or renting servers under this network system are usually serving more Malaysian than oversea traffic for their online business (meaning to say most of their internet traffic is from Malaysia). 

Colocating your equipment with EVERWORKS’s Hybrid Network gives you more than just state-of-the art datacenter facilities, but to saves your total recurrence investment on bandwidth in today’s economy. You may visit our website, www.everworks.com for more information on our server colocation package, and we have categorized our package very well with this Hybrid bandwidth. Furthermore, we still offer the non-hybrid bandwidth system to some of oversea clients, who are only or mainly serving oversea traffic (which is currently available in our AIMS Datacenter, package name as Premium). Below are the some explanation when evaluating EVERWORKS's colocation package.  

Example of Who Should Consider our Hybrid Bandwidth System? 
1. Telcos Solution Provider 
2. Malaysian Forum Provider 
3. Malaysian Blogger 
4. Malaysian Portal 
5. Local Data Backup (SAN) 
6. WAP-based Solution Provider
7. Local Messaging Providers
8. Internal Billing & CRM System
9.  Disaster Recovery Site


Finally, let's talk about how Hybrid Bandwidth is born in Malaysia's Internet Industry? Firstly, I think everyone of us should say thank to the MYIX (Malaysia Internet Exchange) - www.myix.my, who formed in 2006 after the reviewed of MCMC, with main objective of moving back local traffic being routed via MyIX away from international bandwidth links. Another simply word, without this implementation, Malaysian Internet users and providers will keep paying the higher price for their bandwidth. And this is definitely stopping the industry to grow! To know more about them, you may visit their website at www.myix.my. 

So what is the benefits? Of course, by escaping this, many of local operators especially the smaller ISPs enjoy cost savings due to domestic peering. Technically, by peering within MyIX network, mean the local traffic (such as a TM users accessing to Lelong.com.my servers hosted in TM or any local datacenter in Malaysis) is kept domestically, therefore, the boomerang traffic is kept at a minimum and latency between peering operators has improved. In another word, why we are paying so much higher bandwidth before this, is due to all local access are passing by all these international upstream provider such as Level3, Pacnet, PCCW, and etc. 

Read More