I believe-as a few other commenters have pointed out and you allude to, the advantage is that it can be configured and operated like a massive set of cloud VM’s. There’s monitoring, provisioning, network, etc etc all setup and fully integrated.

I imagine colo’s have something like this, but I _suspect_ operationally it’s a lot more powerful, easy to use and functionally closer to the API’s and behaviour users are used to on current cloud providers.

Now, if someone who actually knows for sure feels like chiming in, I’m happy to be corrected.