When partners at law firm Armstrong Teasdale started preparing to move to a new headquarters at Centene Plaza in Clayton last summer, it was a good excuse to make some infrastructure changes. Rather than moving its computer servers across town, the firm left them in downtown St. Louis, locked in cages at 700 N. Tucker Blvd.
“We have a space in a big open room that’s like a chain-link fence, so they call it a cage, where we have our server racks and equipment,” said John Cowling, partner at Armstrong Teasdale. "Every time I open a document, I'm retrieving it from the data center. Every time I get an email, it's going through the data center."
Colocation, as this is called, is one option in the increasingly popular trend of cloud computing. The term cloud computing has several different definitions, depending on whom you ask, but essentially it means computing services obtained on an as-needed basis.
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