Most businesses understand the value of reliable computer systems. But fewer business owners and stakeholders understand how to get the most for their computer system reliabilty dollar.

One of the easiest ways to improve reliability is to use outsourced, hardened data centers. It’s a quick way to achieve 99.995% data center uptime. This level, also knows and “four and one half nines,” equals 27 minutes of downtime per year or less. That is the same level expected of an Uptime Institute certified tier IV data center facility.

Hardened data center facilities offer physical protection from the natural risks common to the region. With Midwest data centers and Midwest colocation, the highest risks involve tornadoes. Hardened data center facilities with reinforced concrete walls and ceilings can physically protect your organization’s most important computers.

Hardened facilities with N+N data center power redundancy protect your systems from power outages. Redundancy means that the outsource data center maintains two of every piece of equipment needed to avoid downtime. But don’t be fooled; not all redundancy is created equal. Ask your data center provider to diagram their power and cooling redundancy. You’ll be surprised at the single points of failure.

Hardened data center facilities with power redundancy and multiple telecommunications carriers allow organizations to build more reliable data networks. More carriers can equal less risk of circuit downtime.

Your organization’s cost of downtime helps you determine the value of outsourced, hardened data center facilities. If more than 26 minutes of downtime per year costs your organization revenue, credibility, or clients, call Lifeline Data Centers at 317.423.2591.

One of our new data center customers is a cloud service provider. Correction: most of Lifeline Data Centers’ new customers are cloud services providers. But this particular customer took advantage of a specific approach to cost savings, resulting in tens of thousands of dollars per year. I’ll refer to this approach, this space between, as Lifeline.

This customer is a cloud services company. Back at start up a few years ago, the company leveraged another cloud provider for the IT infrastructure: server, network and security equipment. This let the company start up fast and provide for future scalability.

But there was a problem. The company became successful. They were acquiring new clients, generating new revenue and scaling their application. But the costs of scaling were too high. The cloud infrastructure pricing model meant that more sales growth would result in lower and lower margins.

So they took a step back and re-evaluated the infrastructure. It wasn’t that complex; it boiled down to VMware, a few servers, a SAN, switches, security appliances and a recovery model. With a few hours of design time, they came up with a modular approach, designed to scale one rack of equipment at a time. The design was a low-cost, over-engineered solution that was resilient enough to take multiple failures and not miss a beat. What they really needed was a flexible, affordable colocation facility to house these racks.

Here is the list of outsource data center requirements they developed:

High uptime: 99.995%: equal to tier IV data center uptime standards of 27 minutes of downtime per year or less

Hardened data center facilities operated by experts who build to the highest data center certifications and resiliency standards

Access to multiple carriers without monthly cross connect fees: Multiple carriers allowed them to negotiate more flexible contracts with multiple carriers. Multiple carriers allows them to control their uptime and service levels. No monthly cross connect fees means lower monthly costs and no upper limit on carrier diversity.

Data center pricing model that is incremental, or pay as you grow

Midwest data center for low, predictable costs of power

The company chose Lifeline Data Centers because Lifeline was flexible and had all of these features. The cloud services company found better profitability by replacing a cloud infrastructure with their own infrastructure at Lifeline. This “space between” cloud computing and the data center may hold lower costs, better service levels or higher profitability for your organization, too.

If your data center is in-house, you may want to consider outsource data center as well. Infrastructure and cloud computing PDF whitepapers don’t talk enough about flexibility when it comes to a company’s physical data center facilities. Check out our whitepaper on outsourcing a data center.

If you’re a cloud service provider, or an IT professional looking to improve uptime ad reduce data center costs, call 317.423.2591 to find out how you benefit from this “space between.”

Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle and other large IT providers insist that data center customers want to deal with fewer, bigger vendors for more of their IT needs. But many IT pros say this “one throat to choke” mantra is self-serving at best and often demonstrably false.

Their response could be summed up this way: “Well, of course HP wants to sell me my servers, my switches, my routers, my storage. But why would I want to source all that from HP, if its storage and networking gear is not up to snuff? Cisco Systems is now, famously, in the server market, but why would I want to trust my data center to a newbie server provider? I want the best server, the best router, the best storage and they come from different vendors.”

In fact, most IT pros say that the mere presence of multiple vendors in their shops ensures that they get better pricing and service from each.

The more throats the better for IT support, pricing
“I have found that to keep a vendor honest and hungry for your business, you should have some competition on-site,” said an IT manager at a large New England medical center.

more of the SearchDataCenter article from Barbara Darrow

Affordable colocation and 99.995% uptime are NOT mutually exclusive. Make sure you understand your outsource data center’s levels of redundancy and the uptime service level agreements in order to get the best combination of uptime and affordability.

Your staff, your clients, and your vendors are expecting a zero downtime data center. But your budget may not be big enough for that level of data center uptime. How do you balance uptime and affordability in your selection process?

If you’re shopping for an outsource data center, you may be asking providers about their Uptime Institute tier rating. Some might say they are tier III data centers. Others may call themselves tier IV data centers. Most are not certified by the Uptime Institute. The cost of certification is prohibitive for many providers. The Uptime Institute Tier Standard: Topology, and its associated white paper are available FREE of charge at http://uptimeinstitute.org/content/view/302/281/ . Likewise, the cost of Uptime Institute membership is prohibitive for many IT organizations. There are a few other rating systems exist for data center redundancy, including the TIA 942 data center standard. How do you evaluate outsource data center alternatives for uptime?

We believe that the better approach to selecting your outsource computer room provider is clearly understand the provider’s specific levels of redundancy and uptime service level agreements.

How do you find out what levels of redundancy exist? Ask tough questions about:

-Hardened data center buildings
-Data center power redundancy
-Cooling systems redundancy
-Telecom entrance redundancy
-Availability of multiple carriers
-Physical security
-SAS 70 data center compliance

You may need to do your homework to learn about critical power and cooling. But understanding the strict detail of a data center’s architecture and the differences between two facilities can make all the difference in the event of an unforseen problem.

If you’re looking for Midwest colocation and affordable data center space with 99.995% uptime (36 minutes of downtime per year or less), give Lifeline Data Centers a call.

Studies show that over 50% of commercial enterprises will be faced with a change in their enterprise data center in the next five years.  You may be faced with a shortage of space, power or cooling.  You may be faced with moving a data center.  You may be considering outsource computer room facilities rather than building your own.  Is there value in outsource data center facilities?

The answer is almost always yes.  Unless your company has in-house expertise on building mission critical facilities like data centers, there may be great value in considering outsource data centers.  Data center capital costs can be outlandish, even for a small facility.  The cost of building facilities with uptime levels that are comparable to Uptime Institute Tier IV data centers is even higher.

Ask yourself these questions:

What level of data center uptime does my company require?  If the company needs 99.995% uptime or better, you should consider outsource data center.

What level of mission critical facilities expertise does my company have on staff?  Is the company prepared to build and maintain facilities in-house?

Does it make more sense to trade data center capital costs for operating expenses?  Is the cost of capital too high?

Does data center compliance play a role in my company’s decision?  Outsource data centers with a focus on compliance can solve problems that cost a company tens of thousands of dollars to handle on their own.

Do you have more questions?  Call the outsource data center and compliance experts at Lifeline Data Centers.

Good data center strategy includes considering the long-term costs of power for the data center, and managing those costs on a long-term basis. Many companies have found that outsource data center facilities (colocation) can help them reduce data center power costs, while improving critical systems availability (uptime).

Companies that pay over 6 centers per kilowatt hour stand to save money by considering outsource data center facilities. Some of these high-tech data center facilities offer power billed as you use it. Lower power costs in the data center mean lower long-term IT costs for your organization.

One note: don’t forget to include the costs of cooling in your power cost estimates. The cost of electricity to cool your computer room is roughly the same as the cost to run the IT equipment. A few outsource data center pricing models include power for cooling in the per kilowatt hour pricing. This type of data center pricing model makes it very easy to forecast growth and change in your data center.

As an added bonus, many outsource data center facilities offer 99.995% uptime. That equates to 36 minutes of downtime or less per year. If the provider offers features like F5 tornado resistant facilities along with power and cooling redundancy, you may be able to save money while improving overall data center uptime.

Ask yourself these questions:
What is the cost of power at your present data center?
Does downtime cost your company sales, credibility, or lost clients?
What sort of resiliency and redundancy (uptime) have you built into your data center?
Then talk to a colocation facility where you can reduce data center power costs while at the same time minimizing your data center downtime.

This post removed at the request of the Uptime Institute.

Many companies that call us for information ask us what "tier" we are.  The Uptime Institute has established a tiering system that helps companies classify and evaluate data centers and colocation facilities.  The tiering system focuses on a number of categories.

Most data center professionals are concerned with:

• Delivery paths
• Redundant components
• Available watts per square foot
• Raised floor availability and height
• Floor loading
• Utility voltage
• Downtime
• Available support staff

Most of these characteristics are focused on minimizing downtime. Rather than the Uptime Institute tiering system, many clients are now using an uptime service level as their criterion, such as 99.995% uptime, or "4 1/2 9’s."  That equates to 0.4 hours of downtime per year. 

The key components of a 99.995% uptime data center include two active electrical feeds to your equipment, concurrently maintainable generators, UPS and HVAC systems, along with multiple telecom carriers, often in a carrier neutral data center.

Other characteristics such as floor loading, and available watts address high-density enterprise data center implementations that are common in large data centers today.

Lifeline Data Centers builds facilities to be TIA-942 compliant data center facilities. We aim at 99.995% uptime which is an uptime level that can be compared Tier IV data center.  Lifeline does NOT maintain an Uptime Institute certification. 

If downtime is costly to your business, then you should be considering a tier IV data center. If your looking for an affordable colocation facility, take a closer look at Lifeline

Do you need a zero downtime data center?  Can you afford it? 

Most experts will tell you that the cost difference between 4 1/2 9’s and 5 9’s (the difference between 99.995 % uptime and 99.999 % uptime) is often too expensive to consider.  It is actually a math problem;  is your cost of downtime higher than the incremental costs of higher availability from your  data centers and systems?

All high availability data centers are not created equal.  A tier IV data center as rated by the Uptime Institute can still have downtime.  TIA 942 compliant data centers can have downtime.  Outsource and enterprise data center design details have enormous impact on your risk of downtime.

So it’s about defining your requirements, then managing risks.  Leverage the expertise of an affordable colocation facility.  Let the outsource data center worry about facilities risks so you can concentrate on your critical computer systems.