How Close (or Far) Does Your Datacenter Need to Be?

A question we’ve been asked for over 20 years now is: How close or how far does your datacenter need to be to your business? and the answer is… it depends on you and your business!

Here’s some things that actually influence this decision:

• The first thing is are you moving a critical application out of your business, out of your office into a datacenter, and is that application latency sensitive?
  In the case of a hospital: are you looking to move your EMR that you’re still hosting internally into a facility that actually has proper security controls and generators and diesel fuel and air conditioning and all this other wonderful stuff that’s really expensive to build and maintain on your own, and just outsource them facilities portion to a datacenter? In those cases, you probably want to have the datacenter really close to you, and you want to be within the Metro market. 
• The counter to this becomes if you’re looking at this in our placements related to protecting against a natural disaster: hurricanes in Florida, earthquakes in the West coast, tornadoes, these sorts of things do have real impact on your operations and where your data center is and where your data center should be to protect against being impacted by these things really matter.

For a lot of applications, the latency is sensitive, but it’s not as sensitive as you would think. Common examples would be if you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area you could have a datacenter in Sacramento or maybe as far as Salt Lake City or Reno, and that’s perfectly close for you. Or if you’re in Los Angeles, your datacenter can be in Phoenix or Las Vegas, or if you’re in New York you could go down to Ashburn or Reston or Baltimore and these sorts of things are very common.

When we talk about datacenter location, datacenter placement, what we’re really looking for is: 

• What does your application need? 
• What does your business need? 
• What do the intersection of those two things really look like? And, let’s not forget,
• How are you going to ship equipment there? 
• Who’s going to maintain it once it shows up? 
• Do you have an IT person that needs to drive from your office to the datacenter to take care of your equipment?
• Are you in a position to either hire locally or outsource to a logistics company or rely on smart hands in order to support that facility?
  

So these are all big important parts of this conversation and something that we need to discuss. If you’re trying to figure out where to place the datacenter, give us a call at ITBroker.com we’ll walk you through the process and make sure that you end up with the right facility so that way your business wins.