A few hours ago, Indianapolis City-County Councilor Benjamin Hunter (@HunterForIndy) posted these two entries on Twitter:

Public Safety Director Straub just officially announced the new city Homeland Security & Emerg Ops Ctr will be going to Eastgate in my dist.

I appreciate Director Straub working with me and owner Alex Carroll in getting this important project in my district. Public Safety job one!

Lifeline Data Centers (@LifelineDataCtr) is proud to serve the City of Indianapolis.

What sort of data center redundancy do you have? This question is really two questions:

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

The 2010 Haiti earthquake killed more than 210,000 people, and approximately 1 million people were evacuated from their homes. That disaster was followed about a month later by the 2010 Chilean earthquake, which scientists said shifted the earth’s axis, and generated a blackout that affected 93% of the country and lasted for several days in some areas. And more recently, the death toll from China’s recent earthquake is nearing 2,400 according to reports.

In the aftermath of Katrina and other hurricanes a few years back, IT staffs in certain geographic areas made hurricane preparation a top priority in IT disaster recovery (DR) planning.

These earthquakes in Haiti and Chile should prompt IT organizations to look at how they’re prepared to survive earthquakes, just as Katrina and other hurricanes a few years back made hurricane preparation a top priority in IT disaster recovery planning in certain geographic areas.

more of the SearchDisasterRecovery article from Heather Darcy

A new Forrester Research Inc. report by Stephanie Balaouras examines the lack of progress made in data center disaster recovery since the September 11 attacks in 2001 and, more recently Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

According the report’s summary drawn from Forrester’s Enterprise And SMB Hardware Survey,about 27% of enterprises in North America And Europe in Q3 of 2007 do not have a recovery site. Additionally, “23% of enterprises never test their disaster recovery plans, and 40% test their plans once per year.” Balaouras says this data points to a failure to make the business case for disaster recovery.

more of the SearchDataCenter article

ROEL Construction implemented Virtualization and storage solutions that improved data center operations and would scale to meet its future needs, while providing the eco-friendly and cost-saving benefits of reduced power and energy consumption.

When ROEL Construction needed a new cost- and energy-efficient solution that would centralize storage and be eco-friendly, the company opted for a virtual data center. Kevin Fitzpatrick, ROEL’s IT director, discusses the challenges, choices made and results of these efforts.

As a 90-year-old family-owned company operating in today’s roller-coaster business world, ROEL Construction strives to maintain its ideals and founding beliefs, which center on integrity, quality and trust. With more than 250 employees in five locations, including our headquarters in San Diego, we operate more than 25 job sites. Just fixing things that go awry in the normal course of business—a mistakenly deleted business-critical file or a server that is down—could take a whole week if we reacted to events as they happened.

Finding a way to proactively design our IT infrastructure to support the business, intercept problems before they occur and keep our company ahead of foreseeable IT challenges has been the key to making technology a driver of our success. One example is our effort to create efficiencies in our data center.

more of the Baseline article from Kevin Fitzpatrick

As we are all aware, a business continuity plan is only effective if it accurately reflects the needs, technology and structure of the organization. But, more importantly, a business continuity plan can only be considered to be truly effective if the content and the components of the plan have been exercised.

Continuous exercising ensures that there are no gaps or issues; that the key people involved in either the emergency response and / or business recovery teams are fully aware of their respective roles and responsibilities; and helps ensure that teams will interact effectively during a major operational disaster.

I am often asked what is required to ensure that an exercise is effective? In essence the key components of an effective exercise can be broken down into three simple activities:

1. Planning and preparation
2. The exercise itself
3. Exercise outcomes and remediation.

more of the Continuity Central article By Chris Bakowski

Late last year a high-street financial institution experienced a power failure at an IT centre in Yorkshire, shutting down cash machines for a few hours, as well as undermining retail transactions and online banking. This incident was only the latest in a telling series of power failures affecting UK organizations including ISPs, hospitals and financial trading firms, highlighting the growing need for effective assessment of risks and disaster scenarios. This encompasses effective IT infrastructure planning, provision of power supplies and environmental concerns influencing organizations’ daily operations.

The scope for knock-on effects such as system failure and critical data loss has been intensified in recent years by the expansion, complexity and power constraints on ICT infrastructures as ‘UK plc’ migrates an increasing proportion of business processes and systems online. In 2008 Gartner made a global prediction that half of data centres will start to run out of effective power supplies. However, local conditions often present more immediate difficulties.

more of the Continuity Central article from Chris Smith

One of the biggest challenges IT managers face today is increased demand on data centers. New technologies, security threats and compliance requirements have forced many IT execs to consider other data center options, from consolidation to IT outsourcing options such as cloud computing and colocation providers.
In the past, when large budgets, venture capital investments and growing revenues reigned supreme, solving data center overutilization problems was a simple matter of building a bigger and better data center. With today’s economic downturn, that solution just won’t fly. Data center managers have found themselves dealing with annoying details, such as return on investment (ROI) and total cost of ownership (TCO), before the CFO loosens funding for any project, particularly breaking ground on a new data center facility.

IT execs must perform due diligence before proposing a solution an over-utilized data center, and that requires a long, hard look at the problem and all available options. With data centers, there are many paths to consider.

more of the SearchDataCenter article from Frank J. Ohlhorst

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.

Take Bob Zandoli, chief information security officer (CISO) at MetLife Inc. He spearheaded an ambitious disaster recovery strategy that ultimately reduced the insurance company’s recovery time objective from 28 hours to six hours and its potential data loss from 41 hours to 15 minutes. These improvements in data loss and recovery time required shifting from a single recovery site with off-site tape storage to establishing a second recovery site with remote disk mirroring.

“It wasn’t a matter of, ‘Go build it.’ It was a matter of how can we seize opportunities to make it cost as a little as possible,” said Zandoli, a vice president of strategic planning services at MetLife before his recent appointment to CISO.

more of the SearchCIO article from Linda Tucci