Reliability is becoming the most important commodity in the data center. Most of your customers would agree that reliable access to your computer systems is more important that application features.

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.

Does data center uptime equal your company’s reputation?

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.

Lifeline Data Centers has added a video to the home page of our website. It’s a quick overview by me on what the heck we do.

Lifeline’s affordable colocation facilities are being used by companies who care about data center compliance, 99.995% uptime or better, colocation power costs and risk management. Would outsource data center facilities help you with your critical computer systems? Call Lifeline at 317.423.2591.

Thanks to Another Cool Design for their great work on the video.

What is your company doing to balance high data center uptime with manageable facilities costs? If you’re like many medium to large organizations, you’re considering wholesale colocation facilities as an alternative to traditional outsource data centers.

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.

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

What are the real costs of operating your enterprise data center? The electrical power needed to maintain an enterprise data center continues to increase.  Yet in small businesses, the cost of the data center’s electrical power is rarely assigned to the IT department.    Decision makers in the finance and IT departments should consider this hidden cost when evaluating new projects. 

For a small business in Indianapolis with:

• one rack of server equipment
• 2 UPS systems
• router
• firewall
• 2 switches
• 30 workstations
• 10 printers

electrical usage is roughly 9 KW/hr. Cooling is another 18 KW/hr for a total of $1167 per month. Approximately $525 per month is for the servers and communications equipment.

Compare this pricing to an outsource data center: $850 per rack per month plus the cost of a telecommuncations circuit. Affordable colocation is a reality. By using an outsourcer’s hardened data center, your are protecting your systems from critical downtime. If the provider offers tier IV data center facilities, you’ll also be improving uptime via redundant power and cooling systems.

The idea of using a Midwest colocation provider may be the right choice for your business. Outsource data center facilities offer the advantage of large data center facilities at affordable prices for small business. Looking for a provider? Give Lifeline Data Centers a call at 317.4523.2591.

Why must your managed services provider also be your outsource data center provider? Why do organizations assume that they must use their favored managed service provider’s data center facilities?

The skill sets for outsource computer room providers are obviously different from the skill sets for information technology managed service providers. And while there are benefits of having the same provider for continuity of service and “one-throat-to-choke,” choosing separate outsource data center and managed service providers can give you more effective results.

Wouldn’t you be better off with flexible, affordable colocation space where your favorite managed services provider can manage your IT environment, along with the best managed services offerings to match your unique applications? For flexible outsource computer room facilities with 99.995% data center uptime, Call Lifeline Data Centers at 317.423.2591

Are you wasting time and resources on your data center?

If your company relies on your computer systems to generate revenue, deliver services, or manufacture your product, your computer room facilities can be a source or worry. You spend lots of money on power, cooling, equipment and labor to keep your most important computer systems up, running and reliable.

But are you wasting time and resources on your data center when you could be spending less money for more reliability?

If you care about uptime, you probably have a generator for your computer room. You may have one or more power conditioning systems with battery backup to protect from a power outage. If you are in the Midwest, you probably have a hardened data center that can withstand an F5 tornado. Your company has likely spent significant capital dollars on your computer room, all to improve the reliability (data center uptime) of your key computer systems.

But is it enough? The answer is another question. How many minutes, hours or days can your systems be down? 99.995% uptime is 28 minutes of downtime per year or less. But it takes two of everything (N+N data center redundancy) to deliver 99.995% uptime. That means TWO electrical feeds from the power company, TWO generators, TWO power conditioning systems, and two air conditioners, to start.

Companies uptime requirements have changed. Even small companies “bet their business” on their computer systems. Will your company spend the money to build a 99.995% level of reliability?

If your company needs 99.995% uptime, or anything close to that level, consider affordable colocation providers: carrier neutral, outsource data center facilities with shared space, private cages, and no cross connect fees. The cost per month may be less than your spending now. The reliability and data center uptime will likely be higher than what you can build. Lifeline Data Centers is at 317.423.2591. Email us if you’d like more information on improving your data center uptime.

What does data center downtime cost your business? Do you lose credibility, revenue, profits, or clients when your systems are down?

If your cost of downtime is low, don’t waste your time reading this post. It isn’t for you.

If your cost of downtime is lost credibility, lost revenues, lost profits, and/or lost clients, what can you do to reduce your risks?

Use the 80/20 principle. Power and cooling issues account for a majority of prolonged outages in your organization’s data center. You can reduce the risk of power outages with data center power redundancy: two utility feeds, two generators, two UPS systems feeding your critical systems. You can reduce the risks of cooling failures by employing two or more air conditioning systems to cool your equipment, along with two or more ways to remove hot air from your data center environment.

The problem is that building data center facilities with these features is extremely expensive. The capital costs of a 1500 foot data center can easily exceed $1 million. But a few select outsource data center facilities can solve downtime problems at prices comparable to your existing enterprise data center.

Compare outsource computer room facilities with the cost of operating your own. Look for data centers that have N+N (2N) redundancy. Many outsource facilities claim to have data center power redundancy and multiple cooling systems. Make sure you’re getting what you pay for.

Don’t overthink this. Thanks to the lower costs of telecom, It’s no longer about where your critical systems reside. It’s mostly a math problem. Compare the cost of downtime plus the costs of operating your existing computer room to outsource data center facilities. You may be surprised.

High availability data center facilities with 99.995% uptime or better can solve many downtime problems. Affordable colocation facilities (outsource data centers) can help you manage your costs while improving your data center uptime.

A CIO strategy that includes flexible data center facilities can help organizations through changes in the economy, lines of business, revenues and profitability.

Flexible data center facilities help CIOs add racks, power density and temporary systems as needed. Outsource colocation and outsource data center facilities can deliver this flexibility as an operating expense rather than capital costs.

Outsource data center facilities that offer private cage space and separate square footage/active rack charges allow organizations to build for growth and change.

Carrier neutral data centers with no cross connect fees and help control long-term telecom costs and improve network reliability

Building a hardened data center with 99.995% uptime (equal to Tier IV data center ratings) is cost-prohibitive for most companies. Leasing space in an affordable colocation facility with 99.995% uptime is easy.

Maintaining data center compliance is expensive. Data center certifications can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to implement and tens of thousands to maintain. Outsource data centers let you outsource data center compliance, such as SAS 70 data center certification, TIA-942 compliant data centers, HIPAA, FDA, FISMA and other regulations.

The most flexible Midwest colocation provider, Lifeline Data Centers, can help you make your data center flexibility strategy happen. Call 317.423.2591.