Managed Colocation

Managed Colocation Services

Your hardware in our racks, looked after as if it were ours

Download our Managed Colocation information sheet

A comprehensive solution that supports your growth

A fully managed solution from start to finish — design and installation through to ongoing support.

The distinction worth understanding is between space and service. Plenty of providers will sell you a locked cabinet, a power feed and a network port, and everything inside that cabinet remains entirely your problem — including the drive that failed at two in the morning eighty miles from your office. We run the racks, so we can also be the hands and eyes inside them.

Working out what you actually need

Four numbers determine most of a colocation requirement, and it's worth having them to hand before you talk to anyone: how many rack units your equipment occupies, how much power it draws under real load rather than the figure on the label, how much bandwidth it needs, and how quickly it has to come back if something fails. Power is the one that surprises people — a densely populated rack of modern servers can exceed the supply a standard cabinet is provisioned for, and finding that out after installation is expensive.

If you don't know those numbers, that's a normal starting point rather than a problem. We'll work through the kit list with you.

Multiple transit and power connections providing full redundancy

Whether you need a single uplink or many, we can help. If you're not sure how many you need, we'll design a redundant solution with multiple firewalls and switches in failover.

Redundancy is only real if it has been tested, and the usual failure is subtler than a dead link: traffic quietly runs over one path for months, the second is never exercised, and it turns out not to work on the day it's needed. Designing failover is the easy half — knowing it still works is the half that matters.

Redundant power options

A + B power for all colocation customers, providing full power redundancy.

Two independent feeds mean a server with dual power supplies keeps running through the loss of either one. It's worth checking your own equipment can take advantage of that — single-PSU machines are common, and they turn a redundant supply back into a single point of failure. Where that's the case we'll say so rather than let you assume you're covered.

Proactive server hardware support

We can provide proactive server monitoring checking for failed components day and night.

Enterprise hardware is built to survive individual component failures, which is exactly why they go unnoticed: a failed disk in a RAID set or one dead power supply changes nothing you can see from the application. The array carries on degraded until a second failure takes it down for good. Monitoring at the hardware level catches the first failure, when it is still routine.

Hardware replacement procurement

Should a hardware issue arise with your colocated equipment, we can source replacement components, schedule downtime where necessary and replace the failed part.

Because we also supply hardware, sourcing a replacement doesn't mean you chasing a distributor while your array runs degraded. For equipment still under manufacturer warranty we'll raise the call and meet the engineer on site.

Offsite backup solutions

Alongside our colocation services we can provide an offsite backup location, for peace of mind that your data is safe in the unlikely event of a facility failure or an accidental deletion.

Colocation on its own is not a backup strategy — resilient power and redundant network protect you from infrastructure failure, not from ransomware, a bad deployment or someone deleting the wrong thing. Keeping a copy somewhere else is what covers those, and our cloud backup service is built for exactly that.

Getting your equipment in

A migration into colocation is a day with a hard deadline, so it's planned backwards from the point your systems have to be serving users again. That means agreeing the rack layout and addressing before anything is unplugged, having the network configured and tested in advance, and knowing what the fallback is if something doesn't come up. We'd rather spend the time on the plan than improvise it in a car park.