Are hardened data center facilities protecting your mission critical systems? If you have a data center in the Midwest, is the building where your data center is located an F5 tornado resistant data center?

Organizations that have a high cost of downtime try to reach the goal of a zero downtime data center. These organizations minimize downtime by employing tier IV data center facilities, or facilities built using tier IV guidelines. Design considerations include:

-N+1 or N+N data center redundancy including multiple power feeds, generators, and UPS systems
-Other data center redundancy including dual telecom entrances and multiple HVAC systems
-Hardened data center facilities, designed to withstand regional disasters.

If the risk of tornado or earthquake is high, and the cost of downtime is also high, why would you put your mission critical facilities in anything but a hardened data center? If you use outsource data center facilities, watch out for steel deck roofs and office buildings converted to data centers. Concrete walls are fine, but if the steel deck roof peels off in a tornado, your systems are at risk.

Lifeline Data Center uses only concrete reinforced buildings. If you’re interested in 99.995% uptime SLAs with NO downtime in the last five years, call Lifeline at 317.423.2591.

he federal Environmental Protection Agency recently found that a data center’s uptime has no statistically significant effect on its energy efficiency. But does the claim hold water?

At first blush, it would seem that uptime would hurt data center efficiency. Typically the more uptime a facility has, the more redundancy it has to build in to account for equipment failure. But that apparently is not as large a factor as other design elements.

“Tier level was not a huge predictor of energy performance,” said Alexandra Sullivan, an engineer in the EPA’s Energy Star program for commercial buildings. “When we looked at the data, we did not observe a significant relationship between tier and energy use.”

The data was collected between March 2008 and June 2009. For the study, Energy Star looked at more than 100 data centers to determine their energy efficiency. The agency is using the information to create an Energy Star standard for data center facilities, which will be released on June 7. The software will allow companies to rate their data center’s energy efficiency from 1 to 100, a scale similar to that for other commercial buildings.

more of the SearchDataCenter article from Mark Fontecchio

Zero downtime data centers? Expensive, and often cost prohibitive. Read on about outages that affect Google. Everyone is susceptible to data center downtime.

t’s been a rough couple of days for uptime at the world’s most popular sites. This morning YouTube was down for several hours, and Google has yet to issue an incident report. The downtime for the web’s leading video hub follows an outage yesterday for Wikipedia.

Many users visiting YouTube were greeted with an “Http/1.1 Service Unavailable” error message or a 500 Internal Server Error. Videos embedded in third-party sites apparently continued to work just fine. ”YouTube experienced a technical issue this morning,” YouTube reported, using its Twitter feed to state the obvious. “Our engineers worked to fix it and the site is back to normal.”

more of the Data Center Knowledge article from Rich Miller

Todd Gale likened his company’s recent data center modernization to picking up a running locomotive off one track and placing it on another without disruption.

The task was to upgrade a 25-year-old data center, built by AT&T during the 1980s to handle mainframe computing. The building was 125,000 square feet; the data center space, 80,000 square feet. In this case, modernization required ripping and replacing most of the facility’s power and cooling infrastructure — all without incurring system downtime.

Gale, the regional data center director for the Denver-based colocation company ViaWest, led the charge, and the process took 18 months.

more of the SearchDataCenter article from Mark Fontecchio

Considering that we here at Pingdom work with uptime issues daily (as you tend to do when you run an uptime monitoring service), we thought the latest XKCD comic strip was hilarious.

For those who don’t know about it, XKCD is a very popular online comic by Randall Munroe about geeky subjects like math, tech, and so on. If you’re not already a fan, check it out.

more of the Pingdom article

With the current enthusiasm about cloud computing, some have argued that cloud platforms will replace the data center, or reduce the need for physical infrastructure. Or perhaps that all the world’s applications will run out of just five huge cloud computign facilities.

more of the Data Center Knowledge article from Rich Miller

Virtualization technology essentially reshaped IT in the last decade, but we drank so deep and long at the fountain that we enter the new decade with something of a hangover, and lots of fuzzy questions about what we have wrought.

Yes, virtualization has paid huge dividends in data center/server consolidation efforts, and yes it is helping redress the fact that our corporate systems are woefully underutilized. It’s just that the list of issues surrounding virtualization is growing as fast as new applications crop up for this wonderful elixir.

These issues were easier to ignore when we were giddily realizing 10:1 server consolidation ratios and driving utilization rates from below 20% to 50% or more, but it is time to holistically assess where we are today.

more of the NetworkWorld article from John Dix

Stealthy startup SeaMicro isn’t saying much about its technology, which aims to “revolutionize the data center landscape” by slashing the power used in IT operations. The company recently got a $9.3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to further its development of technology to make data centers more energy efficient.

The initial buzz around SeaMicro has focused on its plans to build powerful multi-core servers using Intel’s low-power Atom chips, whose energy efficiency has made them the processor of choice for many mobile phones and laptops. The DOE grant mentions its plans to use hundreds of low-power processors in a design that could “save 75% of the computing energy over conventional servers.”

“The integrated hardware and software design project ensures that the energy consumed within the server is efficiently used regardless of whether the CPUs are hard at work or in ’sleep’ mode,” the DOE notes in its description of the project.

‘Complex Datacenter Appliance’
But SeaMicro’s secret sauce extends beyond the server. The company remains in stealth mode, but says in job postings that it is building a “complex datacenter appliance.” A review of the company’s patent filings reveal plans for a interconnection fabric that will knit together servers, storage and peripherals using hardware-based virtualization.

more of the Data Center Knowledge article from Rich Miller

As data centers get warmer, the environment gets less forgiving. That lesson was learned the hard way at the University of Pennsylvania, which on Tuesday had to shut off the IT systems supporting the school’s financial, research and student services.

More of the Data Center Knowledge article from Rich Miller

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