Why a Sacramento Data Center Isn’t Just for Disaster Recovery Efforts
Businesses in Northern California, particularly those in the Bay Area, might want to revisit their disaster preparedness and recovery strategies as soon as possible. As The Associated Press reports, researchers from San Francisco State University and the U.S. Geological Survey have recently discovered that three previously-inert fault segments in the region have begun to move. One segment runs along the Green Valley fault, which means that everything between the cities of Napa and Fairfield could face a major earthquake in the near future.
As scary as they are, stories like this remind businesses that it’s wise for them to work closely with reliable IT services like Ripple Web to protect their assets. After all, a company’s digital data may be impervious to earthquakes, fires, and other physical threats, but they’re only useful to their owners if they can be migrated to a secure, safe location pre-emptively. In response to imminent threats, certain data centers in California, such as Ripple Web’s Sacramento data center, lease so-called ‘colocation’ facilities, or ‘colos,’ to give businesses resources for protecting their most important data.
Colocation, however, isn’t used just for disaster recovery efforts; its main purpose is to help businesses reduce the cost of maintaining servers, networks, and other computer infrastructure for long periods of time. This is especially useful for businesses that reach peak online activity in the wee hours of the day, because without colocation they’ll have to spend more resources to keep up with this temporary increase in demand. Colocation is also offered to companies that require uninterrupted server activity, but encounter regular downtimes, power outages, and communication problems in their location.
In addition, the concept of colocation isn’t exactly the same as borrowing somebody else’s equipment. Customers must supply the data center with hardware themselves, i.e. for data storage, which would then be hosted by the data center manager for a fee. Typically, the data center also provides secure, climate-controlled facilities to protect their customers’ assets from all threats, earthquakes included, giving greater peace of mind to customers. The high bandwidth speed offered by the best Sacramento colocation facilities is just the icing on the cake.
Given California’s more recent history with earthquakes, it’s understandable for businesses to work with reliable IT services for colocation, with the express purpose of protecting their interests. Their need for colocation facilities, however, shouldn’t be limited to the threat of natural disasters; after all, the concept itself is aimed at improving efficiency and productivity at work.
(Source: Earthquake Study Finds Fault Between Napa, Fairfield Primed For Magnitude-7.1 Temblor, CBS Sacramento, October 13, 2014)
