Choosing between all the different facilities available is a daunting task.  Fortunately, there are criteria out there to help make decisions easier. John Savageau is doing a great series on some of these criteria, and here's a quick look at some of what he's come up with:

The most basic offerings from a data center include concrete, power, air conditioning and interconnections.  Besides these basics, there is a lot of variety in other details of each facility, like security, cost, and reliability, as well as comparative quality of those basics.  Nothing is perfect, so choosing a facility requires you to prioritize your needs.  Different locations have different strengths, so it's important to research facility-dense areas thoroughly.

It's common in the data center industry for facilities to spring up in clusters, since some locations are better suited to support the power, space, and cost requirements of such large and energy-rich structures.  Areas like the southern San Francisco Bay Area, Virginia, Seattle, and Los Angeles, to name a few, boast these sorts of clusters.

Each facility will provide those four basic requirements of concrete/space, power, air conditioning, and interconnection, but the trick is to figure out which are each place's strong points vs. their weak points.  Check out www.USDATACENTERLIST.com for a great resource to locate facilities and John Savageau's blog series for more details of his take on weeding through all the places out there.

-Elizabeth English

photo by s w ellis under flickr creative commons license

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