This is my first posting, so please - be gentle. Haha. I have an opportunity to build a colocation space, and before I jump at it, I'm wondering what the industry (your) view is of current and near term demand. Is there a shakedown on the horizon? Is the capacity that was built during the 90s still out there, and is it depressing the market? Is there any industry-funded study of demand out there thats available? I've seen some reports from IDC and Gartner but they are pretty expensive (>$2000). Also, let me just say that I appreciate any advice or constructive critisism, and thanks for having a forum like this. Also, given your experiences, where's the smart place to spend money in the facility. I'm looking forward to your replies.
Welcome to our board. Colo indusrty is pretty strong and growing fast. As you know most of them are handle by internet such as websites, VOIP, etc..
You need to come up with very good business plan for least next 2 years and it have to much with your budget. Do you have any budget? Do you have enough resources? Are you going to work with any partners?
Thanks
David.K
Quote:
Originally Posted by ginogrossi
Hello all,
This is my first posting, so please - be gentle. Haha. I have an opportunity to build a colocation space, and before I jump at it, I'm wondering what the industry (your) view is of current and near term demand. Is there a shakedown on the horizon? Is the capacity that was built during the 90s still out there, and is it depressing the market? Is there any industry-funded study of demand out there thats available? I've seen some reports from IDC and Gartner but they are pretty expensive (>$2000). Also, let me just say that I appreciate any advice or constructive critisism, and thanks for having a forum like this. Also, given your experiences, where's the smart place to spend money in the facility. I'm looking forward to your replies.
Thanks,
Gino
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Thank you David, for your quick response. My gut feeling is to agree with you - I also believe with the explosion of rich media delivery, podcasting, blogging, rss, collaboration, VoIP, etc there should be a pretty healthy market for colocation services. I'm looking to document this for the business plan. Has anyone posted a sample business plan for a colo? I'd be willing to share what I develop (minus anything proprietary, of course) in return for feedback and advice. Let me ask what should my startup budget be. I'm looking to start with space for 100 servers, and use the income from them to grow to the next level. Total space is about 1500 sq ft - if i could fill that I would be happy.
i am new to this forum but would like to reply to this thread, and please correct me if I am wrong gurus :0)...from what I have seen, the collocation/datacenter industry is going to start getting more expensive on both customer and provider end...there are plenty of cold shell spaces at the moment but what do you have to look for?...well for one you have to look at the facility itself...location....fiber entries...and most importantly POWER....power is becoming scarce and expensive and the prices are only going to rise....it is difficult to find a location where you can get 3 or 4 meg feeds from your eletrical company....which basically means your limited in your growth within that facility...what else do you have to include, well throw in a couple of generators for backups...a couple of UPS's...and your PDU's/rpp's along with the decision of either going raised floor or not....you have to also make the decision on your cooling...your space to air ratio will define how many tons of cooling you can "expect" however that will change...as equipment comes in...it will bring in the hot air with it which may mean you need to add more cooling in specific areas of your colo floor...so the design and layout of your customer racks is VERY important...so from there you decide how many air handlers..how many chillers...are you going to be n+1?...you are probably looking at a heavy budget...id say somewhere in the range of 10-20mil or so if its around 100,000sqft or so....and then you have the leadtime...what is the timeframe for deploying customers?...most generators are on an 8-9 month waiting list....how quickly can you get your providers in there?...do they have to trench out the road in front of your building to bring in fiber?....
there are a lot of factors that play into this...as the others have mentioned, i would be interested in seeing a business plan or something to that nature or knowing what kind of budget you are working with...will you be building this from the ground up?...do you have the land allocated for it?...what about security?...that can get expensive in itself depending if you want your regular card reader access or you are going for biometrics....lots of factors :0)....
now on the bright side....your customers will flock to you if you give them the right pricing...be careful how much leeway you give because this can bite you in the A55...i have been seeing more companies wanting to keep their production equipment at a dc mainly because it is less costly for them then keeping it internal...that means they free up more space in their own office...can outsource their IT/networking/dba's/etc...and not have to worry about making sure its cold enough in their office or having enough power to keep their stuff up and running....an area that looks to be untouched at the moment is datacenters being used for DR (disaster recovery)....so if you have a prime location where there really is no "natural disasters"...and there really is no other dc in that area, that would be gold for companies that need to continuously backup their data and always have access to it if their current location fails them....so the market will continue on from what it looks like...
sorry i went off on a tangent there....i noticed you mentioned its approx 1500sqft...id say you would need about 50-70tons of cool air depending on how dense your customers are in there...but the above stays the same...do you want to be n+1?...if so you would need to be redundant across the board (ie: power, cooling, etc)...for this space i would say probably in the 500k range...again there are multiple factors so this may not be entirely accurate for your scenario :0)
Good Time to Offer Colo?
