Archive for the ‘SAS 70 Data Center’ Category
Is your in-house data center nickel and diming you to death?
Is your internal data center expensive to operate? Forget what’s in the racks. I’m not talking about servers, networking equipment and storage. I’m talking about facilities: your raised floor, your security, your power, your cooling, your telecommunications infrastructure and your fire suppression. How expensive is it to maintain?
Operating a data center in-house is expensive. Real estate floor space costs, raised flooring, reliable air conditioning systems, specialized security and fire protection all drive up the data center capital costs. Small data centers can easily exceed $1 million in capital up front.
Data center power and cooling redundancy is expensive. Multiple UPS systems are fairly common. Dual generators are rare. Rarer still are in-house data centers have two utility feeds. Data center capital costs are high, but the costs of maintaining and operating generators and UPS systems are high as well. N+N data center redundancy (two of everything) is prohibitively expensive for many organizations. You can’t deliver high uptime without power and cooling redundancy, yet uptime requirements continue to rise.
Staffing is expensive. Do you dedicate half an FTE or more to the maintenance of the data center?
Data center compliance and certifications are expensive. SAS70 (Now SSAE 16) data center certification audits start at about $20,000. Other certifications like the Uptime Institute’s Tier IV data center certification can cost more.
Not only are the data center capital and operating costs high, they’re also unpredictable.
How do you control costs?
Wholesale colocation offers an interesting solution. Wholesale data center providers build and operate high-tech real estate. Here are a few of the reasons that organizations choose to outsource the data center facilities.
You can rent the space you need in these giant data centers.
You can still have full control of your IT equipment and telecom infrastructure.
You can benefit from N+N data center redundancy in power, cooling, and telecom to improve uptime.
In a select few outsourced hardened data centers, you can protect your mission critical systems from F5 tornadoes and other regional risks.
Some Midwest colocation providers offer you access to multiple telecommunications providers with no cross connect fees. You can build telecom hubs to better manage the money spent on telecommunications.
You can trade capital costs for operating costs.
You can build a highly predictable cost model that allows for growth and change.
Sick of getting nickel and dimed to death? Call the outsourced data center experts.
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.
PC World — On Monday, we polled IT and business leaders about how they’re using public and private clouds. The respondents to our pair of suveys who say they are well on the way to a completely virtual data center outnumber those who haven’t started using the cloud at all.
Nearly one-quarter of respondents to each of our two polls–one for IT managers and another for business managers–said they’re on the way to a virtualized data center. Only 17 percent of people who took either poll said they’re not using the cloud at all. The remainder have some sort of cloud initiative in place, either public or private.
Based on these results, small businesses seem to be buying into the notion of the cloud, but taking extra precautions against data loss. A spring survey by In-Stat shows that even when SMBs are buying cloud storage, they are also buying NAS systems for internal use to back up the online storage.
More of the CIO.com article from Logan G Harbaugh
Editors note: Data center certifications are required by more companies that ever before. Governments, vendors and customer require data center certfications as a condition of doing business. SSAE 16 is the replacement for SAS 70 data center certifications.
SSAE 16 is one of the most widely known tools for providing assurances to data center customers. It is demanded by customers and there is no substitute for it.
And yet, a myth that the SSAE 16 standard is not applicable to the industry persists. As such, data center providers have no choice but to arm themselves with the following facts about SSAE 16 applicability.
The Technical Basis
The technical guidance for SSAE 16 has two major components which are the SSAE 16 standard itself and the related guide titled “Service Organizations –Applying SSAE No. 16, Reporting on Controls at a Service Organization (SOC 1)”.
The very first paragraph of the SSAE 16 standard states that it is applicable when reporting on “controls at organizations that provide services to user entities [i.e., customers] when those controls are likely to be relevant to user entities internal control over financial reporting.”
More of the SOA World article from Chris Schellman
The State of the Data Center: 2011 report series outlines trends in server and software purchasing, data center infrastructure and more. For findings and analysis on data center spending and technology adoption trends, see the contents of this special report below.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. State of server technology and operating systems
II. State of virtualization and cloud computing
III. State of data center facilities
IV. State of systems management and data center services
V. Survey background and demographics
An overview
In early 2011, SearchDataCenter.com released the Data Center Decisions 2011 survey to gauge trends and understand the factors that influence data center evolution in today’s enterprise. We received more than 1,000 responses from IT professionals spanning numerous roles within the enterprise. In this special report series, we analyze what this data means and take a look at how many of the numbers compare to our 2010 findings. These articles examine several facets of data center design and management to identify interesting trends and surprising revelations about the state of IT operations across many industries.
Article 1: State of server technology and operating systems
After years of economic uncertainty, many companies appear ready to begin spending more on data center hardware. However, the continued emphasis on tight budgets has IT professionals taking a closer look at the hardware they integrate into their data centers. In the first article of this series, we examine what type of server technology IT professionals are choosing for their environments and what factors have influenced IT professionals’ choice of server vendors, including expanded coverage of integrated infrastructures in the data center. The composition of operating system (OS) deployments are also changing in the enterprise, so we’ll look closely at the major OS versions for everyday and mission-critical systems.
More of the SearchDataCenter report
Is data center compliance costing you? How much is your organization spending in time and money to meet the data center certification and data center compliance requirements?
Data center compliance requirements are increasing. Federal and state requirements are on the rise. Organizations are now faced with clients and vendors who require data center compliance.
Physical compliance can often be the most capital intensive and expensive. Data center security and certification requirements can make outsource colocation facilities more cost effective than doing it in-house .
Colocation facilities focus on many certifications and compliance requirements. Here are a few:
SAS-70 data center compliance
HIPAA
FDA
PCI
FISMA
Sarbanes-Oxley
TIA-942 compliant data center
Do the math. Does it make sense for an outsource computer room to do the compliance and certification work for you?
Is wholesale colocation the right venue for your cloud?
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.
Your high-tech landlord – Is affordable colocation your company’s most important real estate?
Your data center is probably more important to your business than it was 10 years ago. Organizations of all sizes have come to expect 99.995% uptime (the same level as a Tier IV data center) to keep revenues flowing and to retain customers, and to communicate with key vendors.
But it is shockingly expensive to build an enterprise data center with such requirements. Some of the requirements to meet such high levels of uptime include:
- Hardened data center facilities: In Midwest data centers, F5 tornado resistant data centers are important.
- Data center power redundancy: Can you afford two utility feeds, two generators, and two UPS systems?
- Data center cooling redundancy: You’ll need at least two air conditioning systems with double the air conditioning your require.
- Data center compliance and certifications: Vendors, clients and the government are requiring expensive certifications such as SAS 70 certified data centers and TIA 942 compliant data centers.
- Security: Physical data center security includes the costs, implementation and maintenance of access cards, PIN pads, locking cabinets, and security cameras with staffing to monitor them.
Some companies choose to “get out of the hardware business” and move their critical applications to cloud service providers like Rackspace and Amazon. Many find that the cost of such a move can be expensive, variable, and hard to forecast.
Other companies choose the high-tech landlord route. They search for an outsource data center with key features:
Experience – Companies are choosing outsource colocation facilities that have a track record
Leadership – Are the owners involved in day-to-day operations?
Carrier neutral data center – Multiple telecom providers are available
No cross-connect fees – No monthly fees to remain connected to the telecom carriers
Simple data center pricing model – Easy to understand and easy to forecast
Ability to grow and change – Can you get extra space if you need it?
Do you have the IT expertise you need to make your business successful? Do you need a venue to deliver your mission critical applications? If the answer is yes, contact a high-tech landlord to find out more.
What is the business impact of outsourcing your data center facilities?
Benefits
Higher uptime – Outsource colocation (another name for outsource data center) providers offer highly reliable facilities with 99.995% uptime, which translates to 28 minutes of downtime per year or less. Outsource data centers help you solve the power, cooling, fire suppression and security problems separately from Information Technology specific problems.
Lower costs – Outsource data center pricing models that allow you to pay-as-you-grow let you manage costs and forecast growth. Incremental pricing models help IT organizations and cloud service providers to build effective ad meaningful cost models for budgeting and charge back.
Better compliance – Companies leverage outsource data center certifications to avoid the costs of certifying internal data center facilities. Are your clients asking for SAS 70 data centers, Tier IV data centers, HIPAA, FISMA, and PCI compliance? Are you willing to bear the resource and financial burdens of maintaining compliance and related data center certifications?
Risks
Managing off-site data center facilities can be complex, whether the data center is for primary production systems or secondary, backup systems.
Moving data center facilities is a complex process. Some companies cannot stand any sort of outage or downtime for their computer systems. Moving to an outsource data center is a complex project.
Choosing the wrong outsource data center provider can be an expensive proposition. What are the key components? 99.995% uptime, a flexible data center pricing model, no cross-connect fees, SAS 70 data center compliance are good places to start.
Do the benefits of using outsource computer room facilities outweigh the risks your organization? Call the data center strategy experts to learn more.
Why might Midwest colocation may be your best choice?
- Low data center power costs
- Low costs of construction
- Great access from the rest of the country
Why might Indianapolis be your best choice for your colocation provider?
- Dense concentration of telecommunications fiber
- Low data center power costs
- Strong pool of talented information technology professionals from Purdue, IU and Rose-Hulman
- Vibrant, easy to access technology community
Why might Lifeline Data Centers be your best choice for a Midwest data center provider?
- Ten years of history delivering affordable colocation with 99.995% uptime
- Privately held and owner-operated by veteran IT professionals
- Fifteen carriers with no monthly cross-connect fees
- SAS 70, TIA 942, HIPAA, FISMA, NIST, PCI, FDA compliant
- N+N redundant architecture (equivalent to a Tier IV data center)- better design means less downtime
- Private cages or shared space
- Secure office space on a 41 acre campus
- 10,000 square feet available
Want to know more? Call Lifeline at 317.423.2591
