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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On the west coast, data centers are hardened by a number of different technologies to withstand the frequent shaking of earthquakes. In the Midwest, hardened data center facilities protect against natural disasters such as tornadoes. F5 tornado resistant data centers protect your mission critical facilities and equipment from natural disasters.

Although the risk of a natural disaster is low, the risk of a prolonged outage in a natural disaster is very high.

Is your enterprise data center protected by a hardened data center building?

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Your expertise on applications, software architecture, network, server and storage design is not expertise on building tier IV data centers with 99.995% uptime.

Likewise, experts on mission critical facilities like hardened data center buildings, data center power redundancy and cooling are rarely experts on mission critical systems and applications.

A best-of-breed CIO strategy would include expertise in both information technology systems design and highly available data center facilities. How is this done?

If your organization likes to “roll your own” enterprise data center, you probably hire design/build experts to help you accomplish your goals of high data center uptime. Although the capital costs associated with in-house data centers can be enormous, internal data centers offer the highest level of control.

If your organization is considering outsourcing the facilities disciplines, wholesale colocation offers a simple way to offload the “landlord” side of the data center without losing control of the systems.

It’s often best to outsource data center facilities when you’re great at IT but not so great at building data centers.

Midwest colocation facilities like Lifeline Data Centers offer F5 tornado resistant buildings,N+N power and cooling redundancy, and access to many telecom providers. Midwest data centers offer low power costs also give you peace of mind that you’ve done the best job at solving the data center downtime problem using an affordable colocation solution.

Are you trying to be an expert in both facilities and IT? Talk it over with the mission critical facilities experts.

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Your purchasing department would probably say yes. Your legal department might too. One throat to choke. They’re looking at the problem from a vendor management perspective, and fewer vendors is better. Or is it?

Ask yourself these questions:

What if you love the data center facility but the quality of the IT services offered are marginal?

What if you already have vendors for specific IT services?

What if you prefer to choose best of breed vendors for specific projects and technical support?

What if your staff does most of the IT work?

Would it be more sensible to separate the choice of data center provider from the choice of IT services provider?

Most companies that choose wholesale data centers over self-built data centers make the decision based on the uptime they get per dollar spent. That’s because these pure data centers, also known as wholesale colocation, concentrate on one thing: mission critical facilities. 99.995% uptime requires incredible attention to detail with hardened data center buildings, redundant power, cooling, telecom access, and data center regulatory compliance. But not all colocation providers are alike; data center reliability varies greatly based on the companies power, cooling, telecom systems, and compliance. If data center uptime is important, then the sensible approach would be to pick the best-designed facility for your needs.

Does it make sense to reject the best-fit data center facilities provider because they don’t do router work, or AS/400 support, or eCommerce platform support? The answer could be yes. It depends on your organization’s applications and your own staff’s talent in supporting these business-specific applications and their platforms. When considering full-service providers, make sure that you understand the quality of the data center behind the provider’s services. You have the option to pick your own wholesale colocation facility and require your vendors to support the hardware in your colocation space.

If you’re purchasing rack space from a full-service provider, you may be paying too much for your colocation space. Especially if your provider maintains a large staff of IT Support Engineers. Bench time is expensive, and unless these Engineers are fully utilized, your rack space pays for part of the Engineers’ wages. Make sure you consider competitive pricing from other colocation facilities. Data center pricing models are excellent indicators of what vendors value and how they handle their overhead.

Your outsource data center provider does not have to be your IT services provider. You have options. You can choose the best among data center vendors with a little homework.

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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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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?

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Companies that pay over 6 centers per kilowatt hour stand to save money by considering outsource data center facilities. Some of these high-tech data center facilities offer power billed as you use it. Lower power costs in the data center mean lower long-term IT costs for your organization.

One note: don’t forget to include the costs of cooling in your power cost estimates. The cost of electricity to cool your computer room is roughly the same as the cost to run the IT equipment. A few outsource data center pricing models include power for cooling in the per kilowatt hour pricing. This type of data center pricing model makes it very easy to forecast growth and change in your data center.

As an added bonus, many outsource data center facilities offer 99.995% uptime. That equates to 28 minutes of downtime or less per year. If the provider offers features like F5 tornado resistant facilities along with power and cooling redundancy, you may be able to save money while improving overall data center uptime.

Ask yourself these questions:
What is the cost of power at your present data center?
Does downtime cost your company sales, credibility, or lost clients?
What sort of resiliency and redundancy (uptime) have you built into your data center?

Talk to a colocation facility where you can reduce data center power costs while at the same time minimizing your data center downtime.

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If your organization

• operates a private cloud
• delivers cloud services
• uses a combination of cloud and internal services

you may want to consider a wholesale data center as the center or hub of your cloud infrastructure.

Outsource data centers can deliver 99.995% uptime. That’s 28 minutes of data center downtime per year or less. You can leverage the data center power and cooling redundancy in an F5 tornado resistant data center without having to spend the capital costs to build your own.

You can maintain the control of your own servers, network and storage without worrying about hardened data center buildings, power, cooling, data center security, and fire suppression.

You can build a primary, secondary, or high-availability computer room that meets SAS 70 data center requirements along with other data center certifications and compliance, without having to use internal resources for compliance.

You can choose which telecommunications providers best suit your needs, in order to build a reliable, cost-effective wide area network.

You can leverage data center power costs by choosing Midwest colocation facilities with lower kilowatt hour costs .

Which wholesale data center is the right place to build your cloud computing data center? Consider these criteria:

• Is the outsource data center provider growing? Look for large, successful data center facilities with room to grow.
• Who owns the data center? Are the owners involved in the day-to-day operations?
• What’s the track record of the business? How long have they been building and operating data centers?
• What level of data center uptime is the provider offering? 99.995% uptime is the promised service level of a tier IV data center.
• Does the provider offer shared space, private cages or private suites? Can you bring your own cabinets? Do they offer optional office space? More options are better.
• What are your choices for telecommunications? If you need flexibility, you need a carrier neutral data center that offers access to many carriers. Look for facilities with no cross connect fees to keep monthly costs low.
• Look for a usage-based power pricing model with low per kilowatt hour pricing. Midwest data centers often have the best power pricing because of lower power costs in the region.
• Look for affordable colocation facilities can deliver 99.995% with a pay as you grow data center pricing model.

If you’d like to build more reliability and predictable costs into your data center, call Lifeline Data Centers at 317.423.2591.

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