Data center colocation describes the physical hosting of computer equipment in a shared environment that is mutually beneficial to various tenants without each incurring the full cost of designing, building, and maintaining the environment. IST provides colocation services in the campus Data Center, located at 2195 Hearst in Berkeley. The service provides customers with a secure location and network connectivity for housing mission-critical servers and related equipment. The data center was designed as a hardened facility and is maintained in a proactive manner to ensure all environmental systems are available without interruption.

The Hearst Datacenter hosts hundreds of colocated servers of all sizes and function, and the carbon and cost savings increases with every campus server that is brought into the central data center. Centralization of physical resources will help improve the economy of scale, lowering the data center costs for the university, and allow departmental IT staff to concentrate on system and application management and development.

The blade approach improves performance per watt. The enclosures takes advantage of thermal design efficiencies, such as ultra-efficient power supplies, dynamic power efficient fans and optimized airflow design that can efficiently cool the chassis to enable exceptional performance in a lower power envelope. The enclosures share power supplies, fans, and backplanes across numerous individual blades, reducing the energy to opereate these components as a whole.