Data Centers
What you need to know when customers need bandwidth

Data Centers are a necessity for enterprises today. Disaster recovery planning has led to a boom in off-site collocation space being provided to house and protect the servers that power the enterprise. These sites provide valuable services to enterprise customers, but there are some things you need to know when designing networks into a collocation space.

The reasons behind ordering 100Mb Ethernet or OC3s to a data center are fairly clear. Customers require large bandwidth connections for their Storage Area Networks (SANs), their servers, for broadband Internet access or for disaster recovery. Whatever the application, when a customer requests pricing for a circuit, there are a couple of questions that should immediately come to mind so that you can deliver exactly what they were expecting.

Many data centers are built in what are referred to as carrier neutral sites. This means the collocation (colo) provider doesn’t dictate that the end user buy circuits from a specific carrier, but instead, the end user can choose anyone they like. To accommodate this, the colo provider builds a Meet-Me-Room. This Meet-Me-Room is a common termination point for all circuits from all circuit providers. In large data centers, a number of carriers will build facilities into the Meet-Me-Room in hopes of serving a number of customers in the space.

As a consultant working with the customer, you should find out how best to help your customer get the most out of this. Ask if your end user requires a specific local provider, or needs to avoid a specific local provider for diversity reasons. With this information, you can work with the collocation space provider to see what other options are available into the building.

When you are pricing circuits for your customer, make sure you know exactly which floor and suite they are in. Most of the time you will price a circuit to the Meet-Me-Room. If so, does the customer know they are responsible for cross-connects from the Meet-Me-Room to their equipment?

Most circuit providers do not place those cross-connect orders, leaving the customer responsible for ordering and paying for that last connection. By the same token, do not assume the customer is on the same floor as the Meet-Me-Room. Some customers have special cages built out and want their circuits to come directly to this cage. This could dramatically change the circuit pricing you provide, so it is best to clarify this up front!

You also want to know whether your customer needs the circuits to be protected, or whether they can be unprotected. You may be surprised by this answer until you know more about how the customer has built the rest of their network. There are many ways to design a network, the less you assume, the better things go when circuits install.