collocation (colocation or co-location)
A colocation (colo) is a facility in which businesses can rent space for servers and other
computing hardware.
The colo typically provides the building, cooling, power, bandwidth and physical security while
the customer provides compatible servers, storage and networking equipment. Besides basic space
rental, many colos extend their services to include leasing for equipment, network and server
monitoring tools, power, redundancy and backup systems. In general, collocation is moving or
placing things together, sometimes implying a proper order.
There are several reasons a business might choose a colo over building its own data center. Some
enterprises use a colo for disaster recovery and redundancy, to host a customer-facing website or
for a testing environment for new projects. Or a a Web site owner could place the
site's own computer servers on the
premises of the Internet service provider (ISP). Or an ISP could place
its network routers on the
premises of the company offering switching services with other ISPs. The alternative to collocation
is to have the equipment and the demarcation point located at the customer's premises.
Contributor(s): Don Brancato and David S. Jones
This was last updated in August 2010
Email Alerts
Register now to receive SearchSOA.com-related news, tips and more, delivered to your inbox.
By submitting you agree to receive email from TechTarget and its partners. If you reside outside of the United States, you consent to having your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States.
Privacy
More News and Tutorials
-
In this Q&A, Rob Davies discusses messaging middleware and the hurdles that many developers face as they first approach the subject. Davis is CTO of FuseSource and coauthor of the book "ActiveMQ in Action."
-
Using textual analytics and natural language processing, Modus Operandi developed a service that analyzes and parses unstructured data and pulls out events or information. Article includes tips on SOA and semantics, SOA and data models, and an SOA recipe for stone soup.Among highlights: Recognize that not everything can be or should be shared.
-
This article provides a master list of common practices, field proven by a number of SOA projects. Also supplied is a template that can be used as a checklist for developing SOA implementation roadmaps specific to an organization's transition project requirements.
