A group of leading U.S. organizations released a task force report titled Recommendations for Measuring and Reporting Overall Data Center Efficiency – Version 1 – Measuring PUE at Dedicated Data Centers. The recommendations for measuring and reporting PUE put forth by the group are aimed at use of multiple energy sources (electric, natural gas, water, etc.).

The report affirms the PUE metric as the industry’s preferred data center infrastructure efficiency metric by The Green Grid in collaboration with 7×24 Exchange, ASHRAE, Silicon Valley Leadership Group, U.S. Department of Energy Save Energy Now Program, U.S. Enviornmental Protection Agency’s ENERGY STAR Program, United States Green Building Council, and the Uptime Institute.

More of the Data Center Knowledge article from Rich Miller

IT staff are good at supporting applications. They are usually talented at designing reliability into your most important business software: application, server and connection redundancy, along with data replication and fail-over procedures. How good is your staff manage the facilities side of reliability?

The lion’s share of outages are related to data center downtime. Power, cooling, security, fire suppression and building failures account for the majority of outages in the enterprise data center.

Large and small companies alike are investigating alternatives to the in-house data center. Some consider outsource data center facilities for high data center uptime (high reliability). 99.995% uptime (27 minutes of downtime per year or less) is the level expected of tier IV data centers. Many CIOs feel that their most mission critical applications require mission critical facilities with 99.995% uptime.

Selecting outsource data center facilities can be tricky. Also known as colocation facilities, these outsourced data centers come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Some focus on IT services. A few focus on providing high-tech real estate with flexible options, so that savvy IT organizations can grow and change without barriers.

Wholesale colocation facilities like Lifeline Data Centers in Indianapolis, Indiana

• Affordable colocation
• 99.995% uptime
• Hardened data center facilities
• Low data center power costs
• Pay as you grow rack and power pricing
• Fifteen telecom carriers in a carrier-neutral data center
• No monthly cross-connect fees
• SAS70 data center compliance
• Data center compliance: HIPAA, FDA, NIST and TIA 942 compliant data centers

Need more reliability? Use wholesale colocation facilities. Leverage decades of experience at Lifeline Data Centers, 317.423.2591.

First came data centers with no chillers. But is the industry ready for a data center with no UPS and no generators?

That seems like a radical concept. But Yahoo is considering going without UPS (uninterruptible power supply) and generators for some future data center projects. It’s not alone in advocating design choices that represent a huge departure from current practice. A number of data center designers are urging clients to consider limiting UPS support to loads that are genuinely critical.

more of the Data Center Knowledge article from Rich Miller

The reliability of your most important computer systems affects the way that you interact with customers and vendors. If your customer-facing systems are not reliable, you run the risk of losing revenues, profits and customers.

If your internal computer systems are not reliable, your employees have a harder time selling, making products, or delivering services. If your customer service systems are down, you’re risking your reputation, and the loss of customers.

How reliable do your systems need to be? The computer industry has a few different metrics for uptime (reliability). 4 1/2 9s of uptime (99.995% uptime) = 28 minutes of downtime per year or less. This is the expected level of downtime for tier IV data centers, the highest uptime tier.

But building and operating an enterprise data center with this level of reliability is expensive. It takes millions of dollars of capital, along with FTEs and ongoing maintenance costs. How does an IT department deliver data center reliability without spending all the profits?

Smart IT departments consider outsource data center facilities as an alternative to building their own. Often times, these companies use the outsource data center as the primary data center, because high uptime and high reliability are most important for a company’s primary computer systems.

Wholesale colocation facilities and wholesale computer rooms like Lifeline Data Centers provide a low-cost alternative to building out a high-reliability data center. And other benefits like data center certifications and data center compliance come along with the package, reducing the burden of compliance for the company.

How important is reliability to your mission critical computer systems? Is your company’s reputation on the line? Call Lifeline Data Centers at 317.423.2591 to learn how your company can improve data center uptime and control long-term costs.

Although opinions on the definition of wholesale colocation facilities vary, they share common characteristics:

Reundant data center power
Data center cooling redundancy
Hardened data center buildings
Fire suppression
Security
A real estate approach to data center space

Many IT organizations benefit by solving the facilities problem separately from their IT issues. They have the expertise in-house to manage IT. But they’d rather outsource the data center facilities problems to experts. Data center compliance and certification issue can also be handled by the outsource computer room facility. This is another area that IT organizations are often happy to outsource.

Lifeline Data Centers, a Midwest colocation facility, offers additional features in its wholesale data center facilities:

Simple pricing model
Pay-as-you grow pricing
Power billed on usage
Carrier neutral data center facilities
No cross-connect fees Private cages or private suites
99.995% data center uptime

Does affordable wholesale colocation sound like it might suit your data center needs? Give Lifeline Data Centers a call at 317.5423.2591.

Do you protect your critical data in multiple data center facilities?
Do the data centers you use deliver a “two of everything” approach to HVAC and power?

You probably only care about data center redundancy if you need high reliability in your key computer systems. High reliability is important if data center downtime is costly to your company. Avoiding data center downtime is usually the driver for data center redundancy. Typical requirements are at least 99.995% uptime, which is 28 minutes of downtime per year or less. 99.995% uptime is the expectation for a Tier IV data center.

Do you protect your critical data in multiple data center facilities? Companies use multiple data center facilities to prevent downtime associated with the loss of a single data center. This used to mean a primary site that did all the work and a secondary site that could take over if the primary site failed. But newer technologies like virtualization, load balancing and storage replication are allowing clients to instead spread the computing power across multiple sites. This approach can deliver more value from a second (often outsourced) data center.

Do the data centers you use deliver a “two of everything” approach to HVAC and power? Most of the data center ratings systems are concerned with:
Data center power redundancy – two or more utility feeds, generators, UPS systems and outlets to each rack.
Cooling redundancy – multiple air conditioning systems
Multiple telecom entrances
And even multiple entrances to the property.
This “two of everything” approach minimizes downtime associated with both failure and the need for maintenance.
Redundancies are required for the tier IV data center rating, and the TIA-942 compliant data center rating.

Data center redundancy is critical if you require high uptime for your systems. Looking for a highly redundant outsource data center solution? Call Lifeline Data Centers at 317.423.2591

Two IT industry groups in the United Kingdom are investigating ways to lower the potential burden on their members who operate data centers, according to ChannelWeb UK. The groups, BCS – The Chartered Institute for IT, and Intellect UK, are researching whether obtaining a side agreement known as a Climate Change Agreement (CCA) would be an “appropriate option” to protect the business interests of data center operators.

Incentive to Outsource?
“The combination of a published league table and increasing financial penalties creates a strong driver to outsource data centers to a third party,” said Liam Newcombe, secretary of the BCS Data Centre Specialist Group. “It also creates direct pressure to offshore existing or new data center capacity, creating a direct risk to value and skills in the UK.”

more of the Data Center Knowledge article from Rich Miller

Endpoint security gets complicated

The Ponemon Institute’s “2010 Access Governance Trends Survey,” which asked 728 IT practitioners about their procedures and outcomes in setting up access to information resources, found the situation worsening over the past two years. In comparison to a similar survey done by Ponemon two years ago, this year’s survey found 87% believed individuals had too much access to information systems, up 9% from 2008.

And in a new question asked this year about how use of cloud computing fits with access-control strategies, 73% of respondents said adoption of cloud-based applications is enabling business users to circumvent existing access policies.Cloud-based services “are often purchased directly by business units without consideration of access governance,” says the 2010 Access Governance Trends Survey, published Monday. The survey was sponsored by Aveksa.

more of the CIO.com article from Ellen Messmer

Only four per cent said governance is driving increased use of data centre capacity in their organisation, suggesting that some businesses may potentially be overlooking the data demands of governance. Currently, businesses are required to retain a vast amount of electronic data for possible government inspection. Key regulatory legislation affecting UK businesses include Basle II and MiFID in banking, HIPAA for the pharmaceutical industry or Sarbanes-Oxley for companies with a US footprint.

more of the Cloud Computing Journal aritcle