Colocation data center providers face unique challenges in managing complex operations while meeting stringent reporting requirements for their customers. Providing accurate, timely, and standardized reports across multiple areas or sites is not only critical for customer satisfaction but also essential for compliance and operational efficiency. Flow Software offers colocation providers a powerful platform for storing, transforming, and sharing data in a scalable, easily managed, and templated manner.

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Storing Data: Timebase as a Free NoSQL Historian

For colocation providers, data storage is about more than just volume—it’s about reliability, accessibility, and cost-efficiency. Customers need long-term access to operational data for audits, trend analysis, and SLA reporting.

Flow Software works with your existing data historian, or if you do not have one already selected, provides the Timebase Historian, a high-performance solution for storing time-series data with lossless compression and high throughput. Timebase requires no license, and the software is completely free, allowing colocation data centers the flexibility to run multiple historians or dedicated specific resources to specific infrastructure or even customers.

Since Flow stands independent of any one data historian platform, it becomes an excellent choice for abstracting multiple vendors namespaces and standardizing a new information namespace, ready to meet your various reporting needs.

Transforming Data: Templated Models for Standardized Reporting

Colocation providers are often required to deliver consistent, standardized reports to multiple customers, covering metrics like energy consumption, uptime, cooling efficiency, and rack utilization. This can become a complex, resource-intensive process, especially across multiple sites. Flow Templates and Data Models enable colocation providers to define reusable templates for metrics and reports, ensuring consistency across all sites or customer-specific areas. This feature includes cleansing data and the creation of standardized calculations and aggregations for key metrics like power usage effectiveness (PUE), SLA compliance percentages, and cooling efficiency, either on a calendar basis (e.g., daily, weekly, monthly) or event-driven (e.g., during maintenance windows).

With a templated approach, colocation providers can reduce manual work, ensure consistent output across multiple customers, and quickly adapt to new reporting requirements as they arise.

Use case example: A colocation provider can use Flow to deliver automated, standardized reports on power and cooling consumption for each tenant in a data center, ensuring compliance with contractual obligations while reducing administrative overhead.

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Sharing Data: Seamless Reporting Across Sites and Systems

Colocation providers must share data across a range of stakeholders—including internal teams, customer IT departments, and external auditors—while ensuring data is properly formatted and delivered on time. With automated publishing, Flow allows colocation providers to define schedules for automated report generation and delivery in formats that match the customer’s or auditor’s requirements. Flow can publish data to multiple destinations, including cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, etc.), enterprise databases, or even streaming services like Kafka or an MQTT broker. Customers or internal teams can retrieve data on demand via Flow’s API, enabling real-time dashboards, ad hoc queries, or integration into custom monitoring systems.

With Flow’s architecture, colocation providers can manage reporting across multiple areas within a single site or across multiple sites with ease. Changes to templates or processes are instantly propagated, ensuring that all reports remain consistent without requiring manual updates.

Use case example: A colocation provider managing multiple data centers can use Flow to automate SLA reporting for energy consumption and uptime across sites, delivering consistent reports to customers while maintaining an audit trail for compliance.

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Key Benefits for Colocation Providers

Colocation providers operate in a highly demanding environment, managing multiple sites with diverse architectures, a growing volume of data, and ever-changing customer requirements. Standardizing information processing across these sites is often one of the most significant hurdles, as differing hardware, software, and operational processes result in inconsistent data handling and reporting.

Additionally, providers must contend with:

• Massive volumes of real-time data: Power, cooling, network, and IT workload metrics generate constant streams of data, which must be stored, processed, and shared efficiently.

• Evolving customer needs and requirements: Customers often demand new reports, custom metrics, or integration with their internal systems, requiring flexibility in both data processing and delivery.

• The need for a hardened, resilient solution: Downtime or failure in data processing can result in penalties or loss of customer trust. Colocation providers need a solution that can stand up to these challenges, ensuring continuous operation and reliable performance across all sites.

Flow Software directly addresses these pain points by providing a standardized, scalable platform for data storage, transformation, and sharing—helping colocation providers deliver consistent, accurate, and timely reports, regardless of the complexity of their infrastructure.

Conclusion: Simplifying Data and Reporting for Colocation Providers

Flow Software transforms the way colocation providers manage, process, and share data. With Timebase for free, scalable data storage, Flow Templates for standardized reporting, and automated publishing capabilities for seamless data sharing, Flow empowers providers to meet their customers’ needs efficiently while reducing operational overhead.

By implementing Flow, colocation providers can ensure consistent, accurate, and timely reporting across all their sites, build stronger relationships with customers through better transparency, and maintain compliance with industry standards—all while minimizing costs.

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