Need Co-Lo? Check The Map!
Posted by
Art Wittmann
October 19, 2007
I was recently kicking the tires on some other data center blogs and came across Data Center Knowledge -- lots of good info there, and among all that good stuff was this link. It's a simple mashup that both shows the power of that technology and provides a really useful tool. The data center map shows colocation facilities around the world. It doesn't pretend to be a complete list (no more than Wikipedia claims to be the sum total of human knowledge), but it's pretty good.
Colocation and hosting facilities have a load of uses -- one in particular is disaster recovery. If you're in Florida and you need at least some of your IT operations to continue business even in the face of hurricanes (or earthquakes in California, tornadoes in the Midwest, and so on) working a deal with hosting provider that's 500 miles away makes good sense.
But figuring just how to do it, just what to replicate, just what hardware you'll need and just what software will make it work -- that's trickier.
To that end, we've recently contracted with long-time Network Computing contributing editor Howard Marks to do an in-depth report on the topic. Howard has been covering storage technologies for medium to large enterprises (think just below the Fortune 500)for years. He's covered Continuous Data Protection, NAS clustering and storage virtualization , storage resource management, and a lot more.
We're happy to have Howard working for us again. Watch here for a preview of his conclusions on disaster recovery and business continuity.
Art Wittmann is a freelance journalist and writer with 30 years of experience in IT and IT journalism. Wittmann specializes in IT infrastructure, cloud computing and data center issues. Email him at artwittmann@yahoo.com Follow him on twitter @artwittmann
