Choosing the right retail data center

As revenue centers, not all retail data centers are created equal. When choosing which ones to invest in, CSPs should look at them through retail customers’ eyes: if a data center is designed to appeal to such customers it will attract the right businesses, creating the value and revenue opportunities that CSPs desire. Here are some attributes to consider:

1. Global presence: The world’s insatiable demand for IP-based services creates huge opportunities for CSPs with globally distributed network capacity. However, creating such capacity through simple colocations and by laying new lines is far too expensive and time-consuming to deliver the margins and agility that most network operators need. By choosing retail data centers with a standardized global footprint, CSPs can simplify and speed up the deployment of services and cost-effectively interconnect to their partners around the world.

2. Flexible options in service providers: Data centers serving corporate customers should welcome all providers of network services and afford neutral treatment to all. By enforcing neutrality, a data-center operator maximizes supplier choice for these customers, helping them interconnect to their global value chains. Although some CSPs may not like the idea of carrier neutrality, it’s a necessary concession to attract the volume and variety of customers that enable providers to generate revenue from retail data centers.

3. Balanced ecosystem: Retail data centers, like retail shopping districts, only work if there’s the right combination of buyers and sellers. Equinix optimizes the mix so that more than half of the companies moving into its newly opened data centers are retail customers in search of network connectivity. In addition to the buyer-seller equation, CSPs should look at a data-center operator’s track record of attracting a diverse blend of network-centric tenants: video sites, social networks, mobile platforms, etc. A diversified ecosystem helps the retail environment achieve a self-sustaining momentum.

4. High standards for service: Retail data centers must foster a service-delivery environment that provides the uptime, security, scalability, efficiency, and performance that all tenants need to accelerate their own business performance. This means turnaround times of a couple days, not a week, for completing cross-connects, and it means a track record of minimizing downtime and outages: five nines may be the industry standard, but seven nines is preferable, not to mention consistently achievable among world-class operations.

In the new revenue environment created by cloud, content, mobile, and other IP-based services, choosing the right retail data center â€” and the right data-center operator â€” is critical. The ideal partner should deliver greater margins, agility and global opportunities in order to connect directly to the most profitable types of customers and their high-volume traffic, allowing CSPs to readily convert today’s retail data centers into network revenue centers for years to come.