Emerson Network Power has identified three areas of opportunity for co-location (colo) facilities must flawlessly meet to motivate more data center owners to move some or all applications to a colo.

In spite of the substantial cost and other advantages, not all data center owners who would benefit from doing so have chosen to use colos.

In a 2012 Data Center Knowledge report, 49 percent of enterprise data center respondents said they used colos in some capacity, 3 percent were testing the concept and 9 percent planned to adopt within 24 months. The remaining 38 percent had no plans to adopt co-location.

To make co-location feasible for data center owners, the colo must be able to meet all the requirements of an in-house data center at lower cost and increased speed while delivering better reliability. Physical and IT security, energy costs, scalability ? including ease and speed of equipment deployment ? and increased visibility are critical to a successful co-location conversion.

In working with their in-house data center and colo customers, Emerson Network Power experts have identified opportunities for colos to better serve customers.

Availability

Downtime is costly for colo providers. An outage can result in customer penalties for failure to meet service level agreements, loss of reputation and loss of business. With that in mind, colo operators should embrace best practices in availability, including careful attention to all uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems. To evaluate UPS systems, colo operators should ask these questions:

? Does the UPS protect the load or itself? UPS should be able to withstand events without going to bypass?

? Does the UPS sacrifice high availability for high efficiency? To avoid this, the UPS must have state-of-the-art efficiency and energy optimisation modes.

? For UPS systems already in place, do they frustrate staff? There are well-designed, user-friendly UPS units on the market today.

Efficiency

Colos can focus more on the operational efficiency of the data center environment. Conducting simple efficiency assessments helps identify where energy is being wasted. Once identified, there are a variety of technologies and approaches that can be implemented to improve efficiency and reduce operational expenditures. These include following efficiency best practices, such as economisation, and taking a thermal management approach that offers holistic solutions for controlling the data center environment.

A thermal management approach highlights the importance of using intelligent controls and aisle containment together. Intelligent controls alone ensure the optimal combination of compressor / chiller capacity and air flow based on monitoring temperature at the servers. This optimisation may allow inlet temperature set points to be between the typical nameplate temperature (75 degrees F / 24 degrees C) and the ASHRAE-recommended limit (80 degrees F / 27 degrees C) for class A1-A4 data centers ? assuming all legacy IT hardware is compliant. When aisle containment is also in place, a 10 degree F /5 degree C increase in inlet air temperature will increase energy efficiency by 20 percent. Additionally, intelligent controls allow all the cooling units to run at a reduced load by allowing them to operate together as a system utilising teamwork. When aisle containment is in place, this reduction in load increases total operating efficiency by an additional 15 percent on average.

Scalability

Scalable infrastructure equipment makes data center deployment faster and lowers costs. Modularity is a low-risk scalability enabler.

Many modular systems are pre-engineered, offering standard configurations with modules that are designed to work together. Implementing modular systems and components is repeatable, which makes scaling for growth easier. Modularity also reduces costs: because modular systems can be deployed just-in-time, colos do not need to size for maximum capacity at startup.