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
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