1. Mechanical  Do the service agreement’s temperatures minimally satisfy your equipment’s needs? If not, it’s clearly a no go.  Confirm the typical repeat occurrence, in years, of the outside temperature and humidity levels that exceed the system’s design ability to maintain the service agreement’s interior conditions?  Do the indoor and outdoor design conditions too greatly exceed your requirements, therefore cost too much?  Perhaps the facility’s rigor speaks well of the provider and the unnecessary benefit leads to only a negligible cost.  Or this design rigor may be an indication not to move into a colo provider and build your own more leanly designed facility. 1

2. Mechanical Reliability Through Time and Temperatures  Is the facility on the edge of disaster or does it employ multiple safety measures (2N vs N+2)?  What is the COLO’s history of failures?  Does the history reflect a key weakness of design, e.g. weather, redundancy, aging or poorly maintained equipment  How quickly and systematically were past failures corrected? 2 or

3. How quickly and systematically were past failures corrected?  Is there a tracking mechanism to record the mechanical state of all cooling equipment and ambient outside conditions before during and after any failures?  Does the provider routinely produce a root cause analysis for each failure, even if it did not interrupt service conditions, which is given to the customers?  Take a look at these to see how well they have been done. If the provider does not have the ability to provide these records, this is another no go indicator.  When the redundancy design level is absent, are all lessees guaranteed immediate notification? 3