Colocation centers can provide the building, cooling equipment, electrical supply or power, network and bandwidth, and physical security while the customer provides their servers and storage. This allows for customers to control the design and utilization of their equipment while having management occurring daily of the entire data center by the colocation provider.

To put this in simple terms, it means that colocation refers to certain components and factors within a data center. This can mean that servers and equipment from several different companies are “co-located” in one data center. Hardware that is placed here is generally owned by the business clients themselves and only placed or possibly maintained/managed by the data center.
Colocation can also refer to a company that has equipment in many different places. Servers can be in four or five different locations, each placed and managed separately. This allows flexibility for companies that may work in many different geographical locations to have their systems and servers near their physical offices.

Cabinets – Cabinets offer a locking unit, generally made of metal that holds a server or server racks. In a data center with many tenants, servers and the cabinets that hold them, are sharing a mutual space raised off the floor as well as the electrical supply and cooling systems.

Cages – Cages refer directly to dedicated server spaces within a raised-floor data center. Generally it is surrounded with mesh walls and a locking door provides access to it. The cooling systems, however, may still be shared with many other tenants within a data center.

Suites – Suites provide a more exclusive space that dedicates space for private servers. It is still in the vicinity of a raised-floor data center, but it is secured through partitions and can only be accessed through a locking door. Depending on the suite, you may share an electric supply and a cooling system with other tenants in the data center, or have dedicated resources for this as well.

Modules – For those that need scalable data center capacity, modules are specifically engineered for the purpose of provide this flexibility or growth to the components.Through the use of standardized components, they are easily to added, integrated, or retrofitted into data center’s that already exist, of course based on the customers need. This means that within a colocation environment, a module would be a data center within a data center, having steel walls, security protocols and its own cooling and electrical supply systems and infrastructure.