Irvine, California, has a strong tech presence, and, as a result, there are state-of-the-art colocation data center options available for businesses large and small. However, when you add the nearly one hundred colocation centers available in nearby Los Angeles to the mix, the choices can be overwhelming.
How do you determine if an Irvine data center will work for you? There are a number of questions you need to answer.
How is Data Protected?
For security, you want the levels provided by a number of data centers – 24-hour security personnel and badges and/or keycards required for access.
Some Irvine data centers have additional biometric security access measures in place to protect your sensitive data. Latisys Data Center is an example of strong security, with hundreds of high-resolution cameras monitoring the premises 24/7.
Many of the centers in Irvine are Zone 4 earthquake-rated reinforced structures. Some centers are seismic-rated in L.A.; some are not, which seriously needs consideration for mission-critical enterprises in light of California’s history.
What About Accessibility and Expansion?
The largest colocation data centers in Los Angeles are located downtown, which can be both an asset and a problem. Located in the heart of Orange County, Irvine colocation data centers are easily reached from several major highways and minutes away from John Wayne Airport.
Irvine provides room for data centers to expand facilities. Large modern data centers are available in Los Angeles, but the data centers downtown are limited in growth potential though internal modifications are done to update and modernize the centers.
What About Disaster Recovery?
Redundancy is critical for keeping servers online.
Data centers in Los Angeles and Irvine both provide varying degrees of disaster recovery. Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) has grown in acceptance in recent years, and Irvine data centers offer it.
However, even the best disaster recovery is not foolproof. Consider what happened in an explosion in downtown L.A. in August of this year that caused a number of disruptions to service for data centers in the blast area.
While emergency backups switched over flawlessly for most, at least one data center was offline for an hour. There was redundancy in the power supplies, but the connections to a number of data centers were affected. You must carefully research all disaster recovery aspects, especially for mission-critical endeavors.
Energy Concerns
One Irvine colocation data center has gone green to provide cleaner, lower-cost energy options for its customers through natural gas.
CenturyLink uses Bloom fuel cells as the primary power source with the electrical power grid as a backup, making the UPS, generators, and transfer switches unnecessary.
Peter Gross, a vice president at Bloom, states it is the ideal system for mission-critical enterprises, both in cost and reliability.
How Do Irvine Colocation Data Centers Stack Up?
Los Angeles may have more colocation data center options in terms of number, but when it comes to features, Irvine data centers more than hold their own. Major global data center providers such as AT&T, CenturyLink, and Latisys have built facilities in Irvine.
By looking outside L.A. to Irvine, you can have the same features and benefits of the centrally-located downtown centers with lower costs and more convenience.
Do you have servers in an Irvine colocation data center? Let us know your thoughts in the Comments box below.
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