You’ve spent years and huge capital expenditure budgets building your company’s internal IT infrastructure. You have racks of beautiful servers and equipment sitting in your corporate headquarters, humming away as you conduct business.
Only no one is there to see this right now because many offices, across the world, have been closed due to COVID-19 and offices have found themselves closed for the foreseeable future. Organisations that never considered remote working are now operating perfectly fine with distributed teams. The only team members left in the office, are the servers.
All alone in the night.
Well, perhaps it’s time to consider re-homing your private servers, internal intranets and other infrastructure you need to do your job. Co-locate them in the Blacknight data centres instead, and benefit from our world-class connections, service and experience. Many people have asked us the simple question: what is co-location? It is putting your network hardware into a third-party data centre. There are lots of reasons to do this.
Here are ten reasons to consider co-locating your equipment in the Blacknight Data Centres.
Connectivity
Blacknight’s core network which has been built using enterprise grade CISCO hardware includes multiple diverse 10Gbps internet services, peering with all major European Internet Exchanges and direct connectivity to major cloud and social media providers. This gives us the ability to provide highly available, fast, low latency connectivity and easily cope with large traffic spikes without impacting customer services. We’re IPv6 compatible, and we are a member of the largest peering exchanges in Europe. Your equipment’s connection to the internet is the fastest you can get. By getting your equipment outside of your office LAN, you make it easier for staff to access it and get work done.
Engineering
When you co-locate with Blacknight, you gain access to world-class facilities and you get our engineering expertise too. With full-time engineers available on-call 24/7; operating highly available data centres is our core business. Let the Blacknight team manage the data centre, power, cooling and connectivity so you can focus on your core business. With hundreds of five-star reviews on Trustpilot for service and support, you can be assured that you will get the best engineering support in Ireland.
Security
Our Tier III data centre is a completely secure location with controlled access. No one is just strolling in here! But you can visit your equipment and work on it yourself. As per our ISO 27001 accreditation, all visitors have to be booked in advanced, and you have to provide biometrics and prove authorisation to work on your co-located equipment. We’re also abiding by all COVID-19 related safety protocols and measures.
Flexibility
We have many different options available. We can rent you a whole rack to place your servers in, or just one unit. Need more space later on? We have plenty of room in our data centre, and you can scale up and scale down as needed. Sometimes, you have custom hardware that is running on old equipment, that you can’t change or replace but is still critical to your operations. We can accommodate that! We know that you can’t put everything into ‘the cloud.’ You don’t need to have a large IT operation to take advantage of co-locating your equipment – even if you just have a server or two sitting under a desk, it will be better suited to a rack in a data centre.
Maintenance
While co-location equipment is generally managed by you, we can also maintain for you and provide hands and eyes support. We can provide you with various levels of service based on what you need. Sometimes you need a switch flipped, and we can do that for you. Sometimes you need to recover from a crash; we can help with that too. Talk to us about your needs, and we can put together a maintenance package that works for you.
Fixed Budgeting
The 2020 Pandemic has thrown budgets into complete disarray. At one time, it made complete sense to have a server rack in your office when the office was filled with people – now it doesn’t make as much sense. If you move it into a data centre, you can rely on fixed costs that won’t break your budgets.
Firewall
Blacknight can provide various firewall options that protect our clients in the data centre. While many co-location services customers bring their own firewall; sometimes that isn’t practical. If you do need additional security you can opt for us to ‘drop a cable in’ and protect your network (or use your own firewall; it’s up to you – did I mention flexibility already?).
One of the Best Data Centres in Ireland
Blacknight has spent years building world-class data centre capabilities in Ireland. Our Dublin data centre has the fastest connections, latest technology, plenty of accreditations and the most experienced team around to ensure that your co-located hardware stays online for your critical operations. Don’t take our word for it though, book an appointment and come see it for yourself.
Why Co-location in Ireland? It Makes Infrastructure Easier
Just because you’ve spent loads of your IT budget on the best hardware, it doesn’t mean you want to run your own data centre out of your office, especially when your team isn’t even there. Take that hardware and the capital expenditure and put it in a data centre, where we’ll take care of the rest, while your team continues to work.
Ready to rehome your hardware? Give our sales team a call or fill in the form below and let us know what you need and we’ll put together something for you!