Summary
- Floor space is interchangeable; power quality, network choice and response discipline are not.
- A colocation decision should be tested against failure scenarios, cross-connect lead times and exit costs.
A colocation facility lets an organisation place its own equipment in a shared data centre, but the commercial comparison should go beyond price per rack. Buyers need to map power density, backup duration, cooling limits, carrier diversity, cross-connect charges and the people authorised to touch equipment. The revealing evidence is an incident record and a timed remote-hands exercise. A cheap cabinet becomes expensive when a failed circuit, delayed cross-connect or locked-in migration interrupts the service it was meant to protect.
