Archive for the ‘Enterprise Data Center’ Category
Why do hardened data center facilities matter? Hardened data centers reduce the risk of a prolonged outage due to natural and man-made disasters.
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?
In this era of cheap-and-reliable rent-a-data centers, does it make sense for a company to build a new data center on its own anymore?
Amazon’s data center guru James Hamilton is pretty clear that he sees no reason for most companies to keep constructing new data centers from scratch, but if they have a huge compute load and really have to, they should build way more capacity than they need and sell off the excess a la Amazon itself.
While Hamilton has a vested interest in people moving their compute loads to Amazon’s infrastructure, his build big or don’t build at all mantra resonates with several other IT experts. The consensus: It makes sense for most companies to trust their data center needs to the real experts in data centers — the companies that build and run data centers as a business. More companies will start moving more of their new compute loads — maybe not necessarily all the mission critical stuff — to the big cloud operators. That roster includes the aforementioned players as well as Google, Microsoft, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle and others that are building out more of their own data center capacity for use by customers.
More of the GigaOM post from Barb Darrow
Does wholesale colocation simplify data center management? Does outsourcing the facilities side of your data center make it easier to manage the data center?
Consider the what it takes for 99.995% uptime enterprise data center facilities management:
F5 tornado resistant data center building- for Midwest colocation
Full data center power redundancy – multiple power feeds, generators, UPS systems and rack feeds
Data center cooling redundancy – multiple, concurrently maintainable cooling systems
Physical security – two factor authentication and multiple layers of loggable physical security
Fire suppression – Reliable, industry standard systems with regular testing and maintenance
Data center compliance and certifications – from SAS 70 to SSAE 16, HIPAA, Sarbanes Oxley, FDA, FISMA and NIST certifications are just a few of the standards
Telecomm redundancy – Multiple telecommuncations feeds with separate entrances into the building
These requirements have nothing to do with Information Technology. They are facilities problems. If a colocation provider can take these requirements off your hands, you’re free to focus on data center management of your business, the applications that support it, and your underlying IT infrastructure.
Yes, wholesale colocation providers can simplify data center management. And if you’re selective, you can use the colocation provider to engineer higher data center uptime levels. Look for a wholesale colocation provider that delivers hardened data centers, N+N data center redundancy, multiple carriers, no cross connect fees, and 99.995% uptime. Power billing based on utilization is key. And don’t forget to shop for low data center power costs.
Wholesale colocation lets you stop worrying about data center facilities management.
Cloud environments are driving data center automation and making it more difficult to do. But if you want to free up resources for other priorities, it’s a must.
Shifting spending from IT operations to innovation and meeting business needs more quickly should be key goals for every CIO. One way to do this is with a highly virtualized data center. But IT won’t get the staff efficiency gains and cost savings from virtualization unless it automates more of the work IT does.
The message is starting to get through: 36% of the 345 business technology professionals we surveyed are already using process automation tools, while 32% have an implementation project under way.
Faster response time to service requests is the top process automation impact, cited by 25% of tech pros surveyed who have fully deployed process automation tools. Others cited reduced errors and shifting staff to new activities–which means freeing IT to focus on higher-value projects. Cash savings, though, can be elusive: Just 11% cut staff, and 5% cite cost reduction as a key impact of process automation.
More of the InformationWeek article from Michael Biddick
Data center building, power, and cooling disciplines are not IT disciplines.
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.
Do you need a hardened data center? If you are trying to protect your data center’s ability to withstand natural or man-made disasters and acts of terrorism, then the answer is yes. The term “hardened data center” described computer room facilities that are designed to withstand tornadoes, earthquakes, and man-made disasters.
Many data center strategies includes using hardened data centers to achieve 99.995% uptime. Hardened data centers, along with redundant data center power and cooling all play a part on maximing reliability and increasing data center uptime.
Not all hardened data centers are alike. Many believe the best type is a reinforced concrete structure. Reinforced concrete offers the best protection against tornadoes, the most common natural disaster in Midwest data centers and Midwest colocation. F5 tornado resistant data centers help companies protect against wost case. Reinforced concrete also offers excellent protection from earthquakes.
Some hardened data centers are constructed as a building within a building, based on the thinking that a natural disaster might destroy the outermost building while the inner building protects the data center. This approach is often used when an existing building is being refit as a data center facility. The effectiveness of the protection is completely dependent on the type of building and construction.
Hardened data centers can be used as primary (production) data center facilities or as disaster recovery sites. Many consider a hardened facility more important for the production environment in order to minimize service interruptions.
How important is a hardened data center? It is critically important if you are trying to avoid downtime and if your area is prone to disaster.
99.995% uptime and affordable colocation are not mutually exclusive. Many companies that visit our data center are surprised to learn that they can have high reliability without the huge capital costs of building a tier IV data center.
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.
Do your worst-behaved applications define your data center requirements?
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.
Takeaway: Gartner analyst Ken McGee has a radical assessment of IT and what CIOs need to do about. Read his principles of the “new CIO manifesto.”
The traditional IT department has entered a period of massive transformation and CIOs are having to completely rethink the way they lead, strategize, and manage their careers. That was the message from Gartner analyst Ken McGee at arguably the boldest and most honest session at Gartner Symposium 2011.
McGee told the convocation of CIOs that it’s time for drastic action and they need to stop doing a lot of the things that are traditional mainstays of IT strategy, and it needs to happen as soon as possible. He said that if you want to use IT to create value in your company as well as develop valuable experience for your career then you need to embrace “creative destruction.”
The idea is that you create something new and don’t worry about the fact that it will kill something old in the process. That’s a natural part of transformation, in this line of thinking. McGee said CIOs should be guided by a “new CIO manifesto” in driving these changes and he gave four principles of this new manifesto, which I’ve listed below.
More of the TechRepublic article from Jason Hiner
Is your organization considering Chicago disaster recovery data centers? Chicago colocation and disaster recovery providers offer many options. Are these best for your organization?
Many factors play in to the selection secondary data center and office space locations. A good CIO strategy includes multiple geographies in an evaluation of disaster recovery centers. For some organizations Midwest colocation outside of Chicago might be a better solution.
Standard features that many organizations look for when considering disaster recovery centers include:
Hardened data center facilities – With Midwest colocation, F5 tornado resistant data centers building are important, along with earthquake resistant facilities in some areas.
99.995% uptime or better – This is the uptime level expected from Tier IV data centers. Some IT professionals consider the uptime is a DR center to be less important than in the primary data center. If your organization is doing real-time or near-real time data replication, data center uptime in your disaster recovery center is likely as important as in your primary enterprise data center.
Multiple carriers with no cross-connect fees – Access to multiple telecom carriers ensures diverse and reliable connectivity in the event of a disaster, or on an ongoing basis with real-time replication. Data centers with no monthly cross connect fees significantly reduce ongoing costs.
Data center compliance and certification – Compliance and certifications in the disaster recovery center are just as important as the primary data center.
Data center pricing model – Simple is better. Most organizations seem to prefer to pay for power, cooling and space incrementally as they use it.
Advantages to Midwest data centers located outside of Chicago include:
- Geographic diversity, especially for Chicago-based organizations.
- Overall lower costs, including, lower data center power costs, lower costs of construction labor, and lower data center capital costs.
- A theoretically lower risk from placing the disaster recovery center outside of one of the USA’s five largest cities.
Wholesale colocation providers offer the most flexibility for organizations that prefer to own and control their own telecom connections, network, servers and storage. Some wholesale data centers offer disaster recovery office space. This space can be custom fit by the organization to use for emergency call centers or workspace recovery.
Considering disaster recovery options in Chicago? Consider Midwest colocation providers outside of Chicago in your search.
