With the term ‘Data Center’ (DC) comes to mind an image of a highly secure room with heavy cabling, cooling and 24 hours of power supply. But in reality DC is a simple place which securely holds your data. The equipment which it needs for the job depends on the capacity of data.

I got the chance to get the feel of a real DC when I visited the DC of IITk (Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur) while undergoing my course for networking at the campus. The IITk DC servers around 6500 computers and has been doing so continuously for last 25 years without any power cuts! That visit made me feel how important a DC could be for an organization and hence pinched me to ponder into the world of data centers.

So get ready to read a really lengthy article on the challenges which an organization faces while building and maintaining a DC. Fasten your seat belts as this is going to be really lengthy and in no sense intriguing if you are not interested.

Let us dive into different challenges and there expected solutions one by one.

Power Availability
Power is the key concern for any DC. No company can afford even a single second of downtime of there DC power as this might well result in restarting of many machines and processes. No one would want that hmm?

Proper UPS and indigenous power generation units need to be deployed. Considering the example of IIT’s DC, they have continuous power supply from the government plus high power UPSs backing up.

Power supply should be designed in a manner that if in future the DC is upgraded or more equipment is added than proper power is easily available for the same.

Crash Recovery Issues
What if even a small piece of your hardware fails. It is bound to leave back some downtime. This will ofcourse be a hurdle in your work.

So you should be ready with your spare hardware so as to avoid downtime. That makes it clear that you always need to have extra piece of same hardware. Same is the requirement in case of complete DC crash. If you are a large organization and cannot afford a single second of downtime than you need to have redundancy in your DC.

Quoting a live example, few months back Indian ISP ‘BSNL’ faced a crash in there Bangalore DC in India itself and the result was no internet for its customers for one full day. They had no redundant DC to take over!

Readiness for Future

Future planning should start from the day you start building your DC. New technologies and scalability options should be an important part of your future planning.

Some new technologies for DC are:

• Virtualization
• DR-BCP (Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plan)
• SAN
• Blade Servers
• Server Consolidation
• Biometric Security
• 10 Gig Ethernet Backbone
• KVM over IP for remote management.

Monitoring
Believe it! You must have a 24×7 monitoring staff, either in-house or outsourced partially/completely.

In-house monitoring has its own pros and cons.

Pros:

• You have your data secured
• You can easily implement your own policies
• Ofcourse money is saved.

Cons:

• In case of new technology change you need to train your staff.
• Increase your staff’s payment so that they do not leave the company.
• Constant motivation is required to retain the staff.

Peak Utilization Days
You need to understand that there will be days of peak resource utilization in your DC.

In such cases a good idea would be to terminate lower priority processes and divert the resources to application with higher priority.

Cooling
Services and other equipment generate a lot of heat in DC which affects the performance of DC plus chances of wear and tear also increase. Thus cooling is important part of DC.

Cooling requirements should be analyzed before you build a DC. For already built DC you need to deploy temperature monitoring and control equipment. Emergency cooling devices like should also be made available.

Inhouse or Outsourced?
This turns out to be the most important criteria for your DC. One should weigh the pros and cons before taking a decision.

• Consider your budget. If you can afford a in-house DC and changing technology, and if you can than outsourcing is of no use.
• Will you current DC handle your additional work load? If it’s not scalable then its better to outsource.
• Check if you have the manpower and if you can keep upgrading to new technology without shortage of manpower. It is better to outsource to professionals if you cannot retain the necessary manpower.

I would suggest a mix of both. Like I learned in my summer training for my final year engineering curriculam:

Critical applications like mail and transaction processing should be handled in-house whereas applications like help desk, website hosting, database management could be outsourced.

It would always be better to preplan your requirements and future goals and then take steps for building in-house/outsourced DC. Its better to spend some time initially for planning than to purposely create situations where your work is halted due to poor DC plans.

Please plan before you move forward else the consequences could be dangerous.

Tweet This Post Delicious Stumble This Post

Tags: data recovery tricks

Related posts

• Cheapest Data-Recovery (3)
• Lost Your Windows Drivers CD? Copy One Machine’s Drivers To Yours. Very Easy! (2)
• Carbonite Review – Best Online Backup Service (3)

New Here? Subscribe For Regular Updates

E-Mail:   SignUp via RSS Feeds