Building and operating an enterprise data center (“flying solo”) can be a daunting task that is capital intensive. Being a tenant at a colocation provider can take a lot of burden off the corporate facilities team and reduce CAPEX, yet leave the IT side of the house bearing the brunt of the responsibility for maintaining uptime of critical infrastructure while concurrently minimizing OPEX.

Incorporating intelligent racks, including power distribution units, environmental sensors, door access controls, asset monitoring, serial consoles and KVM in the IT equipment racks housed at remote colocation facilities is a low cost means of ensuring the IT equipment is using all the power being paid for, that hardware is operating in a safe environment, and that physical security is always maintained, thereby maximizing uptime and return on investment.