What is the Difference Between Hyperscale Centers and Colocation Centers?
A hyperscale data center is a type of wholesale colocation center that has been engineered to meet the technical, operational, and pricing requirements of massive or ‘hyper-scale’ companies like Amazon, Alibaba, Facebook, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and a handful of others. Hyperscale data centers require massive amounts of space and power in order to efficiently support robust, scalable applications for cloud, big data analytics, or storage tasks. For example, hyperscalers require an entire floor of a building or a complete building and 10, 20, or 50 megawatts of power. They also need specific power and cooling redundancy and other user-specific design criteria. Other companies cannot typically connect inside hyperscale data centers. Instead, hyperscalers place a network extension or network node into a retail colocation facility, which allows the companies who are part of the colocation to connect to the hyperscaler.