Most of the mid-size companies that visit our Midwest colocation facility already have a data center. It’s the one in their home office. These companies have built a data center inside the four walls to take advantage of real estate that is already leased, along with cheap, fast network access for all of the employees in the building.

Redundant generators protect against data center downtime

But do all these data center capital costs improve uptime? The answer is yes, but in many cases, not enough. Many of us mistakenly look at the last five years of actual downtime to judge whether our data center is highly reliable. This is a mistake. Your data center may not be reliable, even though you’ve been lucky for the last five years.

What does it take to keep your downtime to less that an hour per year? It takes data center with two of everything that is critical for operation: power, cooling, and communications systems. This two of everything model is also called N+N data center redundancy. Without it, companies should expect hours or days of downtime per year.

Uptime Institute uses a structured system to classify data centers. Tier IV data centers are built with N+N redundancy (two of everything) to maximize reliability. These Tier IV data centers are designed to deliver 99.995% uptime, which is 28 minutes of downtime per year or less. But building a Tier IV data center is expensive. A second power feed into a building can cost a quarter of a million dollars. CFOs routinely reject the idea a second generator because of the exorbitant capital costs. Without N+N data center redundancy, the uptime numbers just don’t add up.

What’s the answer to high uptime and manageable costs? Many companies use affordable wholesale colocation facilities. Some of these outsource data centers offer 99.995% uptime in exchange for monthly operating expenses rather than exorbitant capital costs. Many IT staffers use colocation to reduce their workload, get out of the power and cooling business, and focusing their data center management on their critical computer systems.

Colocation is not for every company. Applications, users, geography and other factors play into whether colocation or cloud computing might improve the reliability of your data center. The bottom line is the cost of downtime to your company. If you need 99.995% uptime, don’t fall prey to the illusion of data center uptime. Consider wholesale colocation to solve the uptime problem and manage data center costs.

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Most companies who need new high uptime data center space compare the costs of building their own primary data center in a company building versus using wholesale colocation facilities, aka outsource data centers.

So what does high uptime mean? Uptime is the measured value in minutes of a company’s computer systems reliability. 99.995% uptime means 28 minutes of downtime per year or less. Companies who value uptime know that downtime causes lost sales, lost profits, and lost clients. These companies haveoften learned about the costs of data center downtime the hard way. Some unlikely circumstance caused an outage that was painful enough for leadership to reevaluate the importance of the server room to the success of the company.

But the cost of uptime is high. A small in-house data center with 99.995% uptime can easily reach $1 million in capital costs, and tens of thousands in staffing, yearly maintenance, SAS 70 and SSAE 16 data center certifications.

What does affordable mean? Here are three characteristics:

Simple data center pricing model – Can you understand how the pricing works? Are there multiple add-on charges and mysterious extra monthly fees?

Predictable – Predictable pricing models make it easy to forecast growth and change. How complex is a three year analysis of your costs? Are there multiple variable costs?

Incremental- Incremental means pay as you use it. Can you grow the number of racks and pay accordingly? Do you pay for electricity as you use it, or based on the circuit size?

The good news: you can have your cake and eat it too. You can meet tier IV data center uptime requirements and still keep data center outsource costs low. The bad news: there are only a few Midwest colocation facilities that offer high data center uptime at affordable pricing. Do your homework and you’ll find flexible affordable colocation with high data center uptime.

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NEW YORK, Nov. 3, 2011 – Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) members will triple cloud deployment in the next 2 years according to a report published by the organization today. This adoption is 5X faster than Q2’2011 IDC market forecasts [1] (Source: IDC Worldwide and Regional Public IT Cloud Services 2011-2015 Forecast (Doc # 228485, June 2011) for the >$90B expected invested in cloud operations worldwide in the next two years and reflects growing member confidence in delivery of industry standard cloud solutions that align with top customer requirements outlined by the organization earlier this year.

The member forecast was delivered as the organization’s leadership outlined its next major advancements in addressing the top obstacles to cloud adoption including publication of best practices for cloud application development and resiliency as well as collaborations on potential standards with the leading industry organizations for cloud security and management, the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF). The announcements are the latest details to emerge from the organization as it moves towards its goal of accelerating over $50B in cloud investment over the next three years.

More of the CloudTweaks.com blog post

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In Part 1, I talked about the most important applications in your business, also know as your mission critical applications. I covered reasons that many of these mission critical applications are ill-behaved and require special care and feeding in your enterprise data center. These reasons include high bandwidth requirements on the headquarters or wide area network, expensive overbuilt servers, and additional hours of maintenance overhead per month.

How do these worst-behaved applications affect your data center requirements?

Bandwidth – Many applications generate large amounts of network traffic for even the smallest user activity. These levels of traffic can cause the applications to perform poorly via the Internet or small remote office connections. These apps can influence your decision on the location of the primary data center. It often seems simplest to place the data center close (in the same building) to your highest number of users. Yet an in-house data center may not fully support your data center uptime requirements.

Interoperability – If your most important applications link up to other important applications, you may be forced to put these applications in the same data center. If your manufacturing system is feeding data to your customer management system and your accounting system, reliability becomes more important, because a small amount downtime can affect three important software systems, not just one.

Souped-up, expensive servers – Experience has taught your IT staff to overbuild server and storage hardware to solve some of the bad behaviors of your mission critical applications. These non-standard configurations can drive up costs. Non-standard configurations are also more difficult to operate in cloud computing environments, forcing the data center to remain physical, instead of virtual.

More Maintenance – More problems mean more maintenance work to solve them. This drives up FTE requirements and makes outsourcing more complex and expensive. Maintenance load can influence location and staff requirements for the data center.

Costly uptime – Problem applications are harder to keep running and often require more technology for high uptime levels. Expensive high uptime technologies like clustering greatly drive up the costs of keeping the application alive and well.

Ill-behaved line-of-business applications influence strategic data center decisions:

Primary data center location – Would your data center be better off in-house, in the cloud, in an outsourced data center facility or a hybrid of all three?

Wide area network design – Where is the hub of the network? How many telecom providers should I use? How much bandwidth do I buy? How can I get the best pricing?

Server hardware ownership and maintenance – Do I buy my own servers for maximum control? Do I use virtual servers in the cloud? Do I use a combination of both?

Maintenance – Does in-house staff do maintenance or do I outsource it?

Good CIO strategy includes a clear understanding of the mission critical applications and their data center requirements.

More CIOs are using these tools to mitigate the risks of their worst-behaved applications:

• Thin application delivery via software by VMware and Citrix to solve bandwidth problems
• Affordable colocation to build in 99.995% uptime on the data center power and cooling
• Cloud computing services like virtual private servers for predictable mission critical applications
• Change management discipline to manage application behaviors and reduce maintenance

Don’t let your worst-behaved applications cause you to make bad decisions about your data center.

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What are some examples of mission critical applications?

• A manufacturer’s most important application might be the production line management system.
• A sales rep organization’s most important application is probably the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.
• A lawn service organization’s most important application might be the home-grown application they paid to have developed that allows them to track clients, contracts, on-site visits and route scheduling.
• A large financial services firm may have many “most important” applications, such as client/account management, real-time updates from the markets, statement printing and archiving.

Why are some of your applications ill-behaved?

Ill-behaved applications are applications that require unusually high levels of server, network, and/or maintenance requirements. Industry specific applications are notorious for being ill-behaved. Problems include input/output intensive processing, server and workstation memory hogging, and network traffic flooding.

Application problems are often related to the software source:

• Your organization may have paid for a team to develop a company specific system. That team may not fully understand the resource requirements of the software they develop until it is finished and in use.
• A small software company with expertise in your industry may have developed the application for a single client, then sold their application to other organizations in the same industry. This small software company’s expertise in software development directly affects the behavior of the application.
• A Large software companies may have been developing applications for your industry for years. They revise the application as technology changes, but the application is largely the same application written 10 or 20 years prior. This old code base often has resource requirements outside of today’s “normal” server and network configurations.

Your IT staff knows if you have ill-behaved applications. These applications are more difficult for the IT staff to maintain. Yet the organization requires that these applications always be available. 99.995% uptime seems to be the expectation. Data center uptime is now critical, even in small organizations.

In part 2, I’ll cover how these ill-behaved applications affect data center design.

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After an almost four-day outage of RIM’s Blackberry service, RIM’s co-CEOs gave a status update Thursday morning. Mike Lazaridis delivered what appeared to be a prepared statement, followed by questions, largely from the media. The way that RIM reacted to the outage will likely shape the company’s fortunes for the foreseeable future. And on the key question, the future health of RIM’s network and its ability to scale, too many questions went unanswered.

Lazaridis started out with an apology and something of a promise. “You expect better of us, I expect better of us,” he said. “We are, and will take every action feasibly, to minimize the risk of this happening again.”

Apparently, one switch’s failure with a bonked-up backup system had such a tremendous “ripple effect” that it caused a world-wide outage for days.

The question that many CIOs and CTOs are asking is, if architecture is planned out right, and testing occurred on a reasonably diligent basis, how exactly could that happen?

More of the Information Week article from Jonathan Feldman

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Here’s a simple version:

• Cloud computing is a fancy name for software and/or hardware that is available via the Internet.
• Colocation is high-tech real estate, or outsourced data center space, where you can operate your company-owned software and hardware.

Here’s another way to look at it:

• Picture cloud computing as a highly reliable (99.995% uptime) computer room full of network equipment, servers, disk storage, software and connectivity, all ready to use for a monthly fee.
• Picture colocation as an highly reliable computer room that’s empty, waiting for your network equipment, hardware, disk storage, software and connectivity to complete the picture.

Both approaches have value. Smaller companies and startup companies may prefer a cloud computing model because it does not require much internal Information Technology expertise to operate. Startup costs can be low with cloud computing, and the barriers to entry are usually small.

Larger companies and companies with strong Information Technology departments often choose colocation, also known as wholesale colocation or wholesale data centers, to house their computer rooms. These companies value colocation’s flexibility for growth and change. Data center capital costs are enormous, and building your own no longer makes sense for many companies that need high levels of reliability. Many cloud computing data centers are housed in wholesale colocation facilities, because the cloud services vendors appreciate the control and cost management benefits of wholesale colocation.

It is also very common for companies to have both internal data center space and cloud computing services. Many companies use software-as-a-service(SaaS) such as Salesforce.com, LinkedIn.com, and ConstantContact.com in addition to having hardware and software of their own.

Both approaches can solve problems like data center compliance and certification requirements, which are expensive and difficult to maintain. SAS 70 data centers, SSAE 16 data centers, TIA 942 certifications and required by many clients and vendors as a condition for doing business. Wholesale colocation and cloud computing services can meet these compliance requirements with little or no extra work from the client company.

Which solution is right for you? For more information, give us a call at 317.423.2591.

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Therefore, the cloud metaphor was used to show abstraction from physical or logical resources within a datacenter or throughout an organization. This is an apt metaphor for one of the enabling technologies of the cloud: virtualization.

We know the concept of cloud computing is not new. During the frantic days of the dotcom era, many startups that wished to provide goods and services over the Internet could not afford to build the required infrastructure to provide those services. This need caused a dramatic surge in new offerings by other startups. These companies embraced the American entrepreneurial spirit by providing outsourced services for IT. They were dubbed as SaaS (software/storage as a service) providers or application service providers (ASPs).

More of the ComputerWorld article from Chris Poelker

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The answer is yes for many companies. Data center outages can mean lost revenues, lost profits, and lost clients. These outages, also known as data center downtime, can disrupt the way service companies deliver their services. Outages can stop a manufacturer from outputting finished product. Downtime means that e-commerce businesses can’t sell goods.

Managing data center uptime is a game of risk management. And the cost of data center downtime for your business is the key factor to determine what you should do. If the cost of downtime is high, it makes sense to employ multiple measures to reduce risks of downtime. Even if the cost of downtime is low, you need to give consideration to the risks of an extended outage, and what you might do to protect the business.

One of the easiest ways to reduce the risk of downtime is to use wholesale data center facilities for your primary computer room. Wholesale data centers, also known as wholesale colocation and outsource data centers, provide hardened buildings, highly reliable power and cooling, and access to multiple telecommunications providers. Many companies have reduced power, cooling and telecom downtime to zero simply by moving into a wholesale data center.

How easy is it to move? It depends on the size and complexity of your primary data center. Technologies like virtualization and SAN have made it much easier. Moving to an outsource data center can be the last move your data center makes.

What about costs? As with most projects, there are ways to keep the costs down. Affordable colocation does exist. Look for owner-operated facilities with plenty of experience. These data centers tend to manage costs better than the large corporations. Midwest colocation provides low cost of power. Look for a simple data center pricing model that lets you pay as you grow. A few outsource data centers offer multiple telecom companies with no cross connect fees. All of these factors can significantly impact the affordability of outsource data centers.

Is your cost of downtime high? Does your business need better data center uptime? Talk to Midwest colocation provider Lifeline Data Centers at 317.423.2591.

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Risk management
Moving a data center is risky. Building a new data center adds risk to the move. If the company’s cost of downtime is low, the risk is probably low. But if an extended computer room outage could endanger the company, then the risk is high. Using an affordable colocation facility with 99.995% uptime can simplify the move and reduce risk.

Data center uptime
Building a facility with tier IV data center uptime levels (99.995% uptime and better) is capital intensive. Requirements include two power feeds, two generators, two UPS systems, two HVAC systems, and at least two of a few more expensive assets. This N+N data center redundancy (two of everything) is the key to the high uptime levels. Companies that build their own data centers often cut corners on these redundancy levels because they are so expensive. And with every budget cut, the company adds to the risk of an extended outage. The right wholesale data center can offer a level of uptime that matches company requirements. Affordable colocation facilities that offer high data center uptime can reduce long-term costs.

The last data center move
Moving a data center to a wholesale colocation facility can be the last data center move a company makes. Moving the primary data center to an outsource data center eliminates the complex telecommunications and data center build out costs from the new location. A company can move people and assets without having to move a data center.

Why are companies moving primary data centers to wholesale colocation facilities?

If a company is thinking of building a new data center, the right wholesale colocation facility can offer lower risk in a lower-cost data center pricing model, with 99.995% uptime or better.

If a company is faced with the challenge of moving a data center, the right wholesale colocation facility with high uptime and cheap access to multiple carriers can be the last data center move a company has to make.

In Part 7 of this series, we’ll address how wholesale colocation can help better manage power costs.

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