The Art of Managed Colocation Services

Managed colocation aims to provide customers with a bit more than the core infrastructure of cages, racks, power and Ethernet drops. A case in point: Prominic.Net Inc., a managed hosting services provider, has rolled out its take on managed colocation. The company’s ColocationPlus service launched this month. Here’s a look at the strategy so far.

Prominic provides the rack, sets up the equipment for customers, and provides a shared or dedicated firewall, noted Mark Roosevelt, Prominic’s vice president of sales. Prominic also lets customers remotely manage their gear as part of its colocation package. The company offers remote power control, KVM-over-IP, and remote serial access, Roosevelt said.  “You’ve got access to practically any control panel and can reboot machines by cycling power,” he added.

Prominic contends remote access gives smaller shops greater control over colocated assets without massive up front expenses. Roosevelt said customers in traditional colocation arrangement must furnish the specialized equipment if they want to do remote access.

In some sales scenarios, customers that have purchased servers without building an adequate, raised-floor data center environment decide to offload their gear to Prominic. Roosevelt said he envisions such customers tapping ColocationPlus to “tweak a little more life out of the servers” and later transitioning to Prominic’s managed hosting services.

Prominic’s ColocationPlus offers a transitional zone where customers who get a taste of services may eventually migrate to fully-managed hosting.

Getting customers to upgrade from colocation to managed services is something other MSPs are thinking about. LatiSys,  Savvis Inc. and Terremark Worldwide are among the companies offering both services and working at cross-fertilization approaches.

Contributing blogger John Moore covers Master MSPs, Web hosts and emerging opportunities. Follow MSPmentor via RSS; Facebook; Identi.ca; and Twitter. And sign up for our Enewsletter; Webcasts and Resource Center.