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Background

The customer interviewed for this story is Don Jackson, Principal Software Engineer at DriveScale. Based in Silicon Valley, DriveScale's offering allows data center managers to deploy flexible, scale-out computing infrastructure using standard servers and commodity storage.

Why Choose Colocation?

Since we are involved in developing scale-out infrastructure for Hadoop environments, we needed a data center. We had some of that internally in a closet, but it was loud and not so effective. We realized we needed more to support our company growth and our requirements were a colocation facility with proper high-density and power.

Our major concern was finding a data center with truly robust cooling to support Big Data infrastructure. Additionally, we were a small group and didn’t want to have to travel far, so finding a local Colo with deep I.T. expertise in-house and close proximity to our headquarters was important. At the time, we were in stealth mode, so investing our finances properly was critical and were only looking to proceed with a Colo that would bring us true value.

Why Colovore?

Eventually, our founders got involved, investigated a variety of options, and found Colovore. They were extremely impressed with the density and power capabilities and also their modern infrastructure and operation. They found Colovore’s offering far superior to all other alternatives.

The density was important to us since we’re doing Big Data build outs - we need lots of power because we have to process a lot of data in short time frames. We deploy a lot of servers to accomplish this successfully and with many servers, networking and cabling also become a significant issue. The benefit of Colovore is that we can stack tons of our servers in a single rack. What you get with one rack at Colovore, you would have to use several racks in another Colo.

We can compress and consolidate our IT infrastructure at Colovore into fewer racks, which saves us money and helps us when we scale. It also cuts down on networking and cabling requirements and is easier to operate. This is why we chose Colovore.

As a result, we received a cost-effective, scalable solution paying by the kW consumed. In addition, we now have the ability to fill the entire rack with servers.

Would you recommend Colovore to another start-up?

Yes. They are fantastic. In addition to their infrastructure and capabilities, they’re always incredibly helpful. There are times when we have big, challenging projects and they will make sure we have everything we need to accomplish our goals. They will be on call, and are ready on weekends and at any time to ensure we have everything we need. They’re fantastic and jump right on it. We get great customer service and great support from them.

Colovore has allowed us to develop a product in a way we could not have done with internal colocation. Everything we needed to do in our offices was not possible. They were our clear first choice. Itʼs been a great partnership. Weʼre happy customers and we look forward to a long term relationship with them.

- Don Jackson, Principal Software Engineer at DriveScale

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