Location, Location, Colocation Is The Key
A quality data centre needs to be a purpose-built facility for colocation. Converting an old office building just doesn’t cut it if you’re looking to build a world class data centre. To make that work you would have to start with the shell of the building and with that much renovation you might as well start from scratch.
Location is the second factor and unless that old building is located along the Metropolitan areas main fiber run or trans-oceanic cable it probably will serve as a second rate location. So the key is to pick the best location and break out the shovels. When shopping for a colocation facility make sure they have paid attention to those details or your businesses data centre will have to pay the price for their poor choices as well.
Redundancy and back up facilities can be built almost anywhere but if you’re across town from the world wide date network you ability to access redundant communications networks will be limited or very expensive to implement successfully. If you want to play in the telecomm’s sandbox you need to be in their neighborhood.
Once you have found a vendor who qualifies make sure they are taking advantage of their advantage by providing infrastructure that can reroute your Internet and IP traffic on the fly and preferably by having an automated and real time observable network operations centre. All that redundancy is moot if the colocation data centre is using a patch panel to reroute your traffic.