Value of Your Data Center
- Data Centers are specialized environments that safeguard your company’s most valuable equipment and intellectual property.
- Data Centers house the devices that do the following:
- Process your business transactions
- Host your website
- Process and store your intellectual property
- Maintain your financial records
- Route your e-mails
´Data Center === Brain of your company
- Your business’ ability to:
- Perceive the world (data connectivity)
- Communicate (e-mail)
- Remember information (data storage)
- Have new ideas (research and development)
- How to:
- Secure the brain
- Help it function efficiently
- Develop its full potential for your business
What do you need to know?
- Physical design and construction of a Data Center
- How to customize the environment to meet your company’s needs
- How to organize and manage your Data Center effectively so downtime is minimized, troubleshooting is easier, and the room’s infrastructure is fully used
- So, how much is acceptable to spend on the construction of your Data Center? That depends. To determine the answer, you need to know the value of what your Data Center is protecting
Shall I simply outsource?
- What is outsource?
- Rent server environment space from an outside company.
- Colocation facility
- Type of data center where equipment space and bandwidth are available for rental to retail customers. Colocation facilities provide space, power, cooling, and physical security for the server, storage, and networking equipment of other firms—and connect them to a variety of telecommunications and network service providers. (from wikipedia)
- How much does it cost?
- Costs for an outsourced Data Center are usually dictated by the amount of floor and rack space your servers occupy, how much power they draw, and what level of connectivity and staff support they require.
Things to consider:?
- Ownership
- Responsibility
- Access
- Up-front costs
Why not to outsource ?
- Server environment contains my company’s most valuable items and handles our business critical functions so you want your own employees to be its caretakers.
- No one can know your company’s server environment needs like you own people who are dedicated to supporting it,
- No matter how good an outside vendor is, it does not have a personal stake in making sure that your Data Center runs correctly the way that your and your coworkers do.
Outsource if:
- You have a short-term need for a server environment, perhaps until a permanent Data Center is constructed
- You want a standby facility ready to take over for a primary Data Center in the event of a catastrophic event.
You still want to outsource!
- Then do not drop the course.
- You need to:
- Know what types of infrastructure you want the facility to have to support your servers
- Foresee what challenges even your rented space might face.
- Be prepared for the day when you may want to build your own Data Center.
Defining Requirements and Roles
- You need to identify the requirements of your data center
- Also, you need to identify the roles and relationship between different employees.
Purpose of building data center
- Why is your company building this Data Center?
- What needs must it meet?
- What specific functions does it need to perform, and perform well, to be considered a success?
What level of availability does your business require
Roles and relationship
- Delineate which departments and people are responsible for what tasks
- Who designs the Data Center’s electrical infrastructure, for example?
- An IT person who manages the room and knows about the incoming server equipment?
- A facilities person experienced with electrical systems?
- An outside architect knowledgeable about regional building codes?
Understanding Client Needs
- Talk to the people who work in the room(your client), and find out the following:
- What servers they want it to support
- How much connectivity those devices need
- What their power requirements are
- Whether clients see trends among the equipment they are ordering most commonly
- Focus on current needs along with future needs.
- Clients knows well their current needs.
Clients may do not have any idea about future needs
Cross-Functional Support
- Responsibility for a company’s Data Center is typically shared among multiple departments and personnel.
- Example:
- Security manager typically governs physical access into the Data Center.
- IT manager coordinates where servers are physically deployed.
- Each one has different point of view with regards to security access.
- Solution: Foster communication and seek compromise
- In order to have well designed data center you need to follow five essential design strategy:
- Make It Robust
- Make It Modular
- Make It Flexible
- Standardize
- Promote Good Habits
Make It Robust
- Above all, your Data Center has to be reliable. Its overarching reason for existence is safeguarding your company’s most critical equipment and applications. Regardless of what catastrophes happen you want your Data Center up and running so your business continues to operate.
- Data Center infrastructure must have depth: standby power supplies to take over when commercial electricity fails, and redundant network stations to handle the communication needs if a networking device malfunctions.
- The infrastructure must be configured so there is no single component or feature that makes it vulnerable. It does little good to have multiple standby power systems if they are all wired through a single circuit, or to have redundant data connections if their cable runs all enter the building at one location.
- In both examples, a malfunction at a single point can bring the entire Data Center offline.
Make It Modular
- Your Data Center must not only have a depth of infrastructure, it must also have breadth. You want sufficient power, data, and cooling throughout the room so that incoming servers can be deployed according to a logical master plan, not at the mercy of wherever there happens to be enough electrical outlets or data ports to support them.
- To achieve this uniform infrastructure, design the room in interchangeable segments. Stock server cabinet locations with identical infrastructure and then arrange those locations in identical rows. Modularity keeps your Data Center infrastructure simple and scalable. It also provides redundancy, on a smaller scale, as the standby systems mentioned previously. If a component fails in one section of the Data Center, users can simply plug in to the same infrastructure in another area and immediately be operational again.
Make It Flexible
- It is safe to assume that routers, switches, servers, and data storage devices will advance and change in the coming years. They may become smaller or bigger.
- Data Centers are not static, so their infrastructure should not be either. Design for flexibility. Build infrastructure systems using components that are easily changed or moved.
- Inflexible infrastructure invariably leads to more expense down the road.
Part of a Data Center’s flexibility also comes from whether it has enough of a particular type of infrastructure to handle an increased need in the future.
Standardize
- Make the Data Center a consistent environment. This provides stability for the servers and networking equipment it houses, and increases its usability.
- When building a new facility, it might be tempting to try something different, to experiment with an alternate design philosophy or implement new technology. If there are new solutions that truly provide quantifiable benefits, then by all means use them. Do not tinker with the design just to tinker, though.
- Once you find a design model or infrastructure component that provides the functions and features you are looking for, make it your standard. Avoid variety for variety’s sake. The more complex the environment, the greater the chance that someone will misunderstand the infrastructure and make a mistake, most likely in an emergency.