For many companies, computer systems reliability is important. Downtime can mean lost credibility, lost revenues, or worse, lost clients. Downtime is usually expensive when companies depend on computers for Internet sales, customer service, delivery of services, and manufacturing. Many companies calculate and assign costs to their computer system downtime. I recently talked to a manufacturing company who puts the cost of downtime at $360,000 per hour.

How does a company build reliability into their mission critical computer systems? One of the easiest ways is to improve the data center (computer room) facilities. Power and cooling problems are huge threats to computer system reliability.

How does a company improve data center facilities? The company can build their own, or use outsource data center facilities like Lifeline Data Centers. There are a few features to look for in outsource data centers in order to get the maximum uptime for the money:

• 99.995% uptime – 27 minutes of downtime per year or less
• Hardened data centers – buildings sturdy enough to withstand tornadoes and other disasters
• Affordable colocation – find a company with a sensible data center pricing model
• Data center power redundancy – multiple utility power feeds (ask!), multiple generators, multiple UPS and HVAC systems
• Carrier neutral data center – Mulitiple telecom carriers available for options on your best price/value combination
• No cross-connect fees – no monthly add-on fees for the right to connect to other telecom carriers
• Data center certifications and compliance – the more certifications and compliance points, the lower the risk of future problems

Lifeline offers 99.995% uptime data center facilities. That’s a promise of 27 minutes of downtime per year or less. Lifeline’s affordable colocation facilities make it easy for companies to improve their computer systems reliability by minimizing data center downtime.

Does your company need more reliability? Contact Lifeline 317.423.2591.

What are the cost components of your data center? How are you spending money to maintain your computing environment?

In-house data centers spend money on

• Floor space or real estate
• Power to the servers and network equipment (sometimes untracked)
• Power to the air conditioners needed to cool the server and network equipment (often untracked)
• Generators, power conditioning/UPS, HVAC systems
• Security systems
• Maintenance of the generators, HVAC and UPS ad security equipment
• FTE support for the facilities side of IT
• Bandwidth and transport: limited choices and retail pricing from telecom carriers

Companies using outsourced data centers often spend on

• Rack space in shared environments
• Power costs based on something other than usage
• Expensive private suites
• Bandwidth and transport: limited choices and retail pricing from telecom carriers

Regardless, companies often purchase inferior services:

• No hardened data center facilities, or facilities not built to withstand a regional disaster
• Limits on power per rack, cooling and space that can drive up future costs
• Significant single points of failure in the power and cooling systems
• Time and money for internal IT resources to solve facilities and physical plant problems

Lifeline Data Centers is different. Lifeline offers outsource data center facilities with:

• Data center expertise
• High data center high uptime
• A simple data center pricing model that allows you to pay as you grow
• Mulitiple carriers in a carrier neutral data center
• No cross connect fees

Call Lifeline Data Centers at 317.423.2591 to learn how you can reduce costs while improving data center uptime.

Earlier this week, I had a chance to sit with Alex Yoder and James McDermott of Webtrends. Alex and James were in town visiting from their corporate headquarters in Portland, Oregon. It was their first visit to Indianapolis.

What did I learn? Webtrends is delivering real value to savvy companies who want to directly influence demand for their products and services. Clients use Webtrends to develop a deep understanding via multiple dimensions of data on their prospects and customers. Their sales and marketing organizations take that data and use it to tune their products, services and messaging. They use Webtrends to track impact on revenues and profitability. Doug Karr calls this an “accelerator pedal” for their marketing machine.

Webtrends delivers their products as software licensing or software-as-a-service (SaaS). They know that delivering SaaS can increase complexity and drive up costs. So Webtrends “eats their own dog food” in order to measure different dimensions of customer behaviors. Webtrends makes decisions on how to generate new revenue, keep existing clients happy, and protect their profitability based on the data from their own product.

Like Webtends, Lifeline Data Centers helps companies generate new revenue, keep their clients happy, and protect profitability. For example, Consona Corporation uses Lifeline to seamlessly grow and change their data center. Lifeline’s flexible offerings help Consona acquire and assimilate new companies to increase revenue. Lifeline’s 99.995% uptime helps Consona meet services levels to keep clients happy. And Consona take advantage of Lifeline’s incremental data center pricing model to control costs and pay as they grow.

Many of Lifeline Data Centers’ clients are SaaS providers. I’m looking forward to telling my clients about Webtrends and the good that they’re doing for clients.

Most businesses understand the value of reliable computer systems. But fewer business owners and stakeholders understand how to get the most for their computer system reliabilty dollar.

One of the easiest ways to improve reliability is to use outsourced, hardened data centers. It’s a quick way to achieve 99.995% data center uptime. This level, also knows and “four and one half nines,” equals 27 minutes of downtime per year or less. That is the same level expected of an Uptime Institute certified tier IV data center facility.

Hardened data center facilities offer physical protection from the natural risks common to the region. With Midwest data centers and Midwest colocation, the highest risks involve tornadoes. Hardened data center facilities with reinforced concrete walls and ceilings can physically protect your organization’s most important computers.

Hardened facilities with N+N data center power redundancy protect your systems from power outages. Redundancy means that the outsource data center maintains two of every piece of equipment needed to avoid downtime. But don’t be fooled; not all redundancy is created equal. Ask your data center provider to diagram their power and cooling redundancy. You’ll be surprised at the single points of failure.

Hardened data center facilities with power redundancy and multiple telecommunications carriers allow organizations to build more reliable data networks. More carriers can equal less risk of circuit downtime.

Your organization’s cost of downtime helps you determine the value of outsourced, hardened data center facilities. If more than 26 minutes of downtime per year costs your organization revenue, credibility, or clients, call Lifeline Data Centers at 317.423.2591.

Considering that we here at Pingdom work with uptime issues daily (as you tend to do when you run an uptime monitoring service), we thought the latest XKCD comic strip was hilarious.

For those who don’t know about it, XKCD is a very popular online comic by Randall Munroe about geeky subjects like math, tech, and so on. If you’re not already a fan, check it out.

more of the Pingdom article

One of our new data center customers is a cloud service provider. Correction: most of Lifeline Data Centers’ new customers are cloud services providers. But this particular customer took advantage of a specific approach to cost savings, resulting in tens of thousands of dollars per year. I’ll refer to this approach, this space between, as Lifeline.

This customer is a cloud services company. Back at start up a few years ago, the company leveraged another cloud provider for the IT infrastructure: server, network and security equipment. This let the company start up fast and provide for future scalability.

But there was a problem. The company became successful. They were acquiring new clients, generating new revenue and scaling their application. But the costs of scaling were too high. The cloud infrastructure pricing model meant that more sales growth would result in lower and lower margins.

So they took a step back and re-evaluated the infrastructure. It wasn’t that complex; it boiled down to VMware, a few servers, a SAN, switches, security appliances and a recovery model. With a few hours of design time, they came up with a modular approach, designed to scale one rack of equipment at a time. The design was a low-cost, over-engineered solution that was resilient enough to take multiple failures and not miss a beat. What they really needed was a flexible, affordable colocation facility to house these racks.

Here is the list of outsource data center requirements they developed:

High uptime: 99.995%: equal to tier IV data center uptime standards of 27 minutes of downtime per year or less

Hardened data center facilities operated by experts who build to the highest data center certifications and resiliency standards

Access to multiple carriers without monthly cross connect fees: Multiple carriers allowed them to negotiate more flexible contracts with multiple carriers. Multiple carriers allows them to control their uptime and service levels. No monthly cross connect fees means lower monthly costs and no upper limit on carrier diversity.

Data center pricing model that is incremental, or pay as you grow

Midwest data center for low, predictable costs of power

The company chose Lifeline Data Centers because Lifeline was flexible and had all of these features. The cloud services company found better profitability by replacing a cloud infrastructure with their own infrastructure at Lifeline. This “space between” cloud computing and the data center may hold lower costs, better service levels or higher profitability for your organization, too.

If your data center is in-house, you may want to consider outsource data center as well. Infrastructure and cloud computing PDF whitepapers don’t talk enough about flexibility when it comes to a company’s physical data center facilities. Check out our whitepaper on outsourcing a data center.

If you’re a cloud service provider, or an IT professional looking to improve uptime ad reduce data center costs, call 317.423.2591 to find out how you benefit from this “space between.”

CIOs are reducing risks by employing outsource data centers to solve their compliance problems. CIO strategy now includes leveraging outsource data centers and the certifications and compliance they maintain to help the enterprise meet government regulations.

CIOs have used outsource data centers for years to drive higher uptime and reap the benefits of lower data center capital costs. Now, many companies are using outsource data center facilities to keep compliance costs under control.

Physical security is one of the main data center compliance benefits that outsource data centers provide. Outsource data center facilities employ multiple levels of physical security to meet state and federal regulations. It’s usually less costly to “rent” the physical security than to build physical security and managing the ongoing physical security costs in-house.

Some data center compliance centers around service levels, or uptime. High reliability for enterprise computer systems can only be achieved in “mission critical facilities” that employ N+1 data center power redundancy and other tier IV data center characteristics. Service levels of 99.995% uptime (27 minutes of downtime per year or less) can be be found in affordable colocation facilities. The cost of building an enterprise data center with similar levels of data center uptime usually reaches into the millions, even for a small facility.

Data center compliance pressures are coming from vendors and clients as well. Many companies now require that vendors and clients operate SAS 70 data centers, TIA 942 compliant data centers, tier III or tier IV data centers. The cost of maintaining these certifications alone can pay for outsource colocation facilities.

Would it make more sense for your organization to use compliance-centered outsource data center facilities rather than building and maintaining your own? Call the data center compliance experts to learn more.

Tonight I was reading on the challenges of cloud computing. I’m not sure how these “security issues” with the data center cloud get blown into these kinds of issues.

The first issue is that cloud providers place several customer’s data on the same physical machine and security policy may require that the information be kept separate. First, this is the very nature of how the cloud works. If you insist on having a dedicated physical machine, don’t use the cloud, it’s that simple.

Next thing is to get over the idea that somehow the cloud virtual machines are different functionally than a dedicated server. Just because the virtuals share a physical machine doesn’t mean they can interact with each other any more than physically separate machines do, nor can they access storage other than what belongs to them.

more of the DABCC article

What is your cost of downtime? If it is high, you may be able to control those costs by employing outsource data center facilities.

Data center facilities downtime events (power, cooling, physical security, and fire suppression) are some of the most common sources of critical downtime in your business. Would a change in your data center facilities improve your data center uptime?

If downtime is expensive to your business, do you require high, tier IV data center uptime levels of 99.995%? Reminder: 99.995% uptime is 36 minutes of downtime per year or less. Very few companies can build affordable data center space at this level of uptime.

Sound CIO strategy must include uptime objectives. For high uptime requirements in large enteprise data centers, most CIOs look to manage:
Uptime service levels
Ongoing power costs
Incremental growth and change

The best outsource data center facilities can offer high levels of uptime, contractually based service levels, incremental bill as-used power costs, and flexible private space. Some even offer multiple carriers in a carrier neutral environment, with no monthly cross-connect fees. Outsource data center costs at the midwest colocation provider Lifeline Data Centers is often less expensive than in-house data center build outs, with a higher levels of data center uptime.

Affordable colocation and 99.995% uptime are NOT mutually exclusive. Make sure you understand your outsource data center’s levels of redundancy and the uptime service level agreements in order to get the best combination of uptime and affordability.

Your staff, your clients, and your vendors are expecting a zero downtime data center. But your budget may not be big enough for that level of data center uptime. How do you balance uptime and affordability in your selection process?

If you’re shopping for an outsource data center, you may be asking providers about their Uptime Institute tier rating. Some might say they are tier III data centers. Others may call themselves tier IV data centers. Most are not certified by the Uptime Institute. The cost of certification is prohibitive for many providers. The Uptime Institute Tier Standard: Topology, and its associated white paper are available FREE of charge at http://uptimeinstitute.org/content/view/302/281/ . Likewise, the cost of Uptime Institute membership is prohibitive for many IT organizations. There are a few other rating systems exist for data center redundancy, including the TIA 942 data center standard. How do you evaluate outsource data center alternatives for uptime?

We believe that the better approach to selecting your outsource computer room provider is clearly understand the provider’s specific levels of redundancy and uptime service level agreements.

How do you find out what levels of redundancy exist? Ask tough questions about:

-Hardened data center buildings
-Data center power redundancy
-Cooling systems redundancy
-Telecom entrance redundancy
-Availability of multiple carriers
-Physical security
-SAS 70 data center compliance

You may need to do your homework to learn about critical power and cooling. But understanding the strict detail of a data center’s architecture and the differences between two facilities can make all the difference in the event of an unforseen problem.

If you’re looking for Midwest colocation and affordable data center space with 99.995% uptime (36 minutes of downtime per year or less), give Lifeline Data Centers a call.