
By Greg Elliott, Director of Business Development at 1102 GRAND
The Kansas City area is an exciting place to be right now. The region is buzzing about innovation, household gigabit fiber and entrepreneurship.
As I’m attending numerous events surrounding these topics, I have noticed a trend in the types of questions and increased interest in data centers, colocation, networks, private cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud, carrier hotels, disaster recovery and the list goes on. So, in the coming months I will work to share with you what I see, hear and learn. If you would like to see a particular topic covered, send me an email at greg@1102grand.com or give me a call at 816-213-7731.
The most common question I have received lately is what is a carrier hotel? (Disclaimer: 1102 GRAND is Kansas City’s carrier hotel and colocation facility.) The simple explanation is that they are facilities almost always found in a downtown area where the fiber is the most dense, close to the ILEC (incumbent local exchange carrier) and have an abundance of carriers/providers with fiber built into the facility. Typically, carrier hotels are identified by their address and they are found in Tier 1 (sometimes multiple) and Tier 2 cities.
Carrier hotels provide a neutral place for carriers and providers to connect their networks. For example, 1102 GRAND has over 30 ISPs (internet service providers) in our Meet Me Room where all the passive connections occur. With so many possibilities for direct connections to multiple networks, carrier hotels make ideal colocation facilities, or offsite data centers, for businesses of all sizes and government agencies that need access to multiple providers, or have large bandwith appetites. The Meet Me Room’s location within the facility where clients already collocate allows clients to easily change or add network services as their model scales or evolves. Additionally, in most cases, access to a network becomes less expensive at a carrier hotel because the end client has a direct gateway to the ISP’s network. The local loop or access charge goes away or is minimal. Sites such as 1102 GRAND are used as primary/production data centers, backup sites or PoPs (point of presence) on the client’s nationwide or global network.
That is a high level overview of the carrier hotel, but if you want to come check out our facility, give me a call and we will make arrangements.
Posted By: Darren Bonawitz, principal of 1102 GRAND

We get this question a lot from prospective customers so I thought I would post this datacenterjournal.com. article, “What Do All Those Nines Mean? In short, don’t base your collocation decision purely on one criteria. The decision on where to collocate or how to design your data center is so much more complicated than that. The same thing goes with the Tier I – IV structure as these inflexible terms are just good for broad comparisons and don’t ever tell the whole story. One facility that can claim 99.99% uptime is not the same as another although many people think that is what it means. Likewise, there are Tier II data centers that are a better fit than some Tier IIIs for some companies. At the end of the day, your business should opt for a collocation environment that is right-sized for not only your uptime and reliability (not all businesses are the same) and your budget.
According to the article, “High availability is critical to many modern IT infrastructures, but the most common means of measuring it—percent availability, or by the “nines”—can be misleading. Availability is often listed as some collection of nines: 99.9% (three nines), 99.9% (four nines) and 99.999% (five nines). Each corresponds to the percentage of time that an IT infrastructure is available: three nines corresponds to about 8.76 hours of downtime a year, four nines corresponds to only about 53 minutes of downtime a year and five nines corresponds to about 5 minutes of downtime a year.”