TOP 10 CRITICAL DECISIONS WHEN CONSIDERING A DATACENTER

Transcription

1 TOP 10 CRITICAL DECISIONS WHEN CONSIDERING A DATACENTER

2 Information technology (IT) infrastructure represents a vital part of any corporation - a business cannot survive in today s market without one. And, unless your company is a major Internet corporation, take Google for example, it s likely you operate with one, maybe two, datacenters. Since that datacenter will house all or most of your mission-critical data and applications, it is essential that you select the right one. But where to start? It can be difficult to differentiate among data center offerings because many have similar features and, unless you know exactly what to look for, simply touring them won t be very enlightening. This confusion or incorrect belief that they are all the same can lead to businesses selecting a datacenter based solely on price or location. While both are important factors, there are many other just as important considerations to consider. Failing to consider critical differences can mean heavy consequences for a business. For example, choosing the cheapest option may end up costing much more in the long run. There are critical differences that should be considered in the selection process. Many of those questions and considerations are outlined below to help you select the best datacenter provider for your business. WHAT IS A DATACENTER, AND WHY DO I NEED ONE In the most basic sense, a datacenter consists of real estate, power and cooling. These buildings offer physically secure floor space that includes redundant power, cooling and network access for your mission critical networks, servers, storage and backups. Datacenters can be used either primary or secondary access points to your applications and data within your network of computer systems. They process and distribute most or all your organization s data and information and are often considered a key business priority and critical to the function of any business. Unlike physical structures where loss or damage can be rectified through insurance policies, data loss is not something so easily fixed. Networks and servers housed within the physical structure of any building assume the same risk as the rest of the building. If there is a flood, fire, power outage or other disaster, the results could be catastrophic. Unlike most commercial buildings, most data centers have additional protections in place for those potential risks and disasters. They provide redundant power, cooling fire suppression, and rigorous processes and procedures to keep your applications and data safe. In addition, datacenters provide heightened security measures - all of which work to mitigate the risks of mother nature and human nature. Whether you store your primary or off-site backup in a commercial data center, datacenter providers have been building, maintaining these facilities for many years, so you sleep at night knowing that every contingency has been thought through and your data will remain safe and secure.

3 BUY, BUILD OR RENT? Once it is determined that a data center is the best option for your organization, the next decision is whether to buy an existing facility, build your own, or rent usage from a datacenter provider. In other words,what makes the most sense - invest in building a dedicated center, purchase a center or lease space from a datacenter provider? Major things to consider when making this decision include: What is your evaluation criteria and does it match the key business stakeholder criteria? Being strategically and culturally aligned is the first and most important step. How much uptime do you need? How much downtime can you afford? Building a datacenter or making any changes can expose your organization to downtime. Datacenters are skilled at helping to prevent, minimize, and manage downtime. Major data outages can be devastating for a business so there must be a plan to effectively manage that should you build a datacenter. Have staffing costs been factored in? Staffing a data center can be a significant investment. It should be considered within the overall cost, as well as ensure the talent has the level of expertise needed to operate the data center at top tier capacity. You ll also want to consider training and turnover and whether you ll insource or outsource the labor as well as the overhead to manage the labor. What is the cost to comply with regulations in your industry and the cost of maintaining audit compliance? In some cases, the audit itself may cost as much as $100,000 annually and your clients will demand to see the results. The fees to improve your processes and procedures after an audit can be costly as well and often lead to unbudgeted ongoing expenses. What is this the best use of capital and operating dollars in your business? Most businesses are not operating from an infinite well of cash. Is the expense of building and operating a data center within the budget of the business?

4 How much capacity for space, power, cooling and network do you need? Building your own may seem doable now, but you ll be building something with fixed capacity. How will you fund flexibility and expansion as your needs grow and decline? How quickly do you need it, and how much lead-time will you be able to give the business stakeholders when the business changes? If you are an evaluator of datacenter services, you need to be aligned with the business stakeholders and their decisions may weigh more heavily toward speed to market. Will this consideration delay your speed to market either now or in the foreseeable future? Building a data center takes time, and as mentioned, capital. This will likely delay speed to market. If that is a serious consideration for your business, it needs to factored. Just some of the many Universal Power Supply backup units available within the LightBound Datacenters. Just some of the many electronics safe, water-less fire suppression containers utilized within Light- Bound s datacenter infrastructure. REDUNDANCIES FOR POWER, COOLING, COMPLIANCE REQUIREMENTS AND NETWORKS When considering the cost and complexity of building or renting, make sure you are comparing apples to apples. Most companies that aren t in the datacenter business will budget for a single source of power and few, if any, redundancies within these critical elements. Most commercial datacenters that offer colocation have built all their infrastructure for primary and secondary power and the facilities to makethese redundancies work properly, including testing everything on a regular basis. When these commercial datacenters plan and build something, the cost is typically 2.5 times the cost that you might be thinking. That s 1 for primary, 1 for secondary and.5 to install and make sure everything is running efficiently. Remember, it can be costly to plan for how long generators will perform. A large reason that not all datacenters and co-location facilities function the same is simple not all datacenters have access to the same networks. A datacenter is of little use if it sits in the middle of a cornfield without access to fiber optics. The score you give on the scorecard changes significantly when you factor in access to local and global fiber. Flexibility and choice is key because what you need today may not be what you need tomorrow these are long-term decisions with implications for years to come. The cooling needs of the computing equipment are of paramount importance in the data center business. Every year, the efficiency of the equipment gets better, yes, but we are all trying to cool equipment that is denser and hotter within a smaller footprint and the equation you are trying to solve for is constantly evolving. So how do you budget and plan for something when you never know where the end zone is?

5 PROXIMITY AND GEOGRAPHIC DIVERSITY This is where many companies should double-check traditional thinking. For many years in IT, companies would locate their primary servers and networks close to most their users because access to the applications required high-speed local area network (LAN) connectivity for acceptable performance. With the proliferation of Web and Cloud-based applications, this is not necessarily the case. More often than not, CIOs are anticipating cloud adoption, which makes the necessity of locating systems close to users more of a risk than a requirement. The reason for that risk is the exposure to the environmental conditions of Mother Nature for a commercial building, as well as the lack of redundancies in power and cooling that we mentioned previously. If you are a CIO or CTO with a cloud-first strategy, you ll want to consider all your primary production AND backup, then not locate any of it in your own buildings or leased properties. Think about the extreme where all users are remote to the applications and datacenters. Should you consider everything being off premises. A good first-base to this strategy is to get all production off-site and use your existing premises or your datacenter as the backup site. Just some of the many electronics safe, water-less fire suppression containers utilized within LightBound s datacenter infrastructure. CERTIFICATIONS Co-location providers themselves, and the engineers who work there, have audits and certifications they need to maintain. These certifications also extend to the provider s offerings like co-location and datacenter services. They can include additional training or upgrades to the facility as well. Ensure that datacenters you are considering meet or exceed these requirements. It may also behoove you to ensure those certifications have been met each of the last several years. Note that there is a difference in the audit standards that your company will need to comply with as opposed to the datacenter service provider. Certifications and compliance regulations to look for include: SSAE16 Compliance: the auditing standard for datacenter service providers This includes the processes, procedures, and security controls for the specific services you are getting. If you are only renting physical datacenter space from a provider, this may be all you need from them. Most co-location providers will tour or host your internal or external auditors for any audit sessions or required paperwork so you can comply with your own standards and requirements. PCI, HIPAA, SOX and the list goes on depending on what business you are in. Once again, the datacenter service provider may only be obligated to satisfy a portion of the audit requirement depending on the services you are getting from them.

6 CARRIER NEUTRALITY Is the data center carrier neutral? By maintaining carrier neutrality, you get options and choices without being held to a particular telecommunication carrier s choices which are usually comprised of only their connectivity options on their networks. Generally speaking, those options are not neutral and not very flexible. Make sure that there are plenty of options for connectivity of all types including fiber, copper, and the ability to cross-connect to other networks. This is important because you may find that your company acquires companies in other parts of the country, or other parts of the world, and you will need options. Carrier neutrality is also particularly important in the case of regional outages. Your provider should have the ability to re-route traffic in these cases or your entire business will be exposed. This situation is also exacerbated when you consider voice services (known as SIP trunking). For most businesses, users need both data (Internet) as well as voice (SIP) to operate effectively. A truly neutral data center provider remains independent of the companies also located in the data center without competing with them. The service provider will sometimes be a wholesaler of connectivity, but a truly carrier neutral provider will allow you to buy or bring your own telecommunications connection. Carrier-neutral facilities are also cost-efficient as they tend to be located in areas of higher competition and connectivity. All of that provides better service for the customers. PHYSICAL & VIRTUAL SECURITY What sort of security protocols does the physical data center structure have? If security is of the utmost importance, consider the following: In-house security staff. Layered security zones. Camera and security systems monitor the 360-degree data center picture. Advanced security certification

7 DATACENTER POWER REQUIREMENTS Redundancy for power is one thing, but the power requirements for future growth is quite another. As we touched on previously, in the early days of the co-location and datacenter business, we planned for two kilowatts of power in a single rack unit cabinet. Power requirements in that same amount of floorspace have doubled or tripled which means that budgeting process we used for building and maintaining datacenters has changed. Who moved our cheese you ask? It matters not who moved our cheese, but that the cheese has moved and no-one could or can predict where it moves next because it s always a moving target. For those who haven t been through all the calculations, just know that the math can be complex. What makes it even more difficult is that the cost to cool all that power is equal to, if not more than, the power itself. If you re not a do-it-yourselfer, rest assured that co-location providers are constantly improving the underlying infrastructure and the efficiency thereof. They are like tire makers - they ve already built the wheel and are making improvements to the rubber on a consistent basis. All you need to do is enjoy the ride. Potential shoppers should consider the following: Look for providers who are capable of scaling beyond 8 kw per rack or 200 watts per square foot. Providers who offer cooling that matches the power output expectations Access to two substations Look for N+2 electrical infrastructure redundancies. Redundancies for UPS and Generators Some of the many facilities infrastructure involved for full redundant power within LightBound s datacenter architecture. TESTING PROCESS & PROCEDURE One of the hidden operational costs to running your own datacenter is all the processes and procedures you ll need to have in place to survive an audit and look your best. Even for the most well run commercial datacenter operators, they budget and spend a considerable amount of money and devote many man hours, not only to write the procedures, but to update those procedures. The environment is constantly changing and there are always improvements that need to be made. There is no set-it-and-forget-it if you re staying ahead of the curve. In addition to the process and procedures,you ll need to test your generators often under load, which means that you ll need to transfer power from to the datacenter to the generator(s) and back again without any downtime.

8 That s a trick you ll need to master if you want to maintain downtime. That s also why companies that do it for a living talk about concurrently maintainable infrastructure. For more information on this, you can visit sites like Datacenter Knowledge to learn more about Understanding Uptime and Data Center Tier Levels at Understanding Uptime. How often does the data center perform load performance testing? While load testing can be expensive,seeing how much load a generator can handle is critical. Load testing should be done often enough that there is confidence in the ability to handle power before an emergency happens. Commercial data centers do this as part of their process and have learned from their mistakes over the course of many years, so that knowledge and real-world experience is part of what you pay for and the value of what you get for your spend. Some of the facilities infrastructure that provides complete power redundancy within LightBound s datacenter architecture. NETWORK OPERATIONS CENTER While many datacenters may seem similar on the surface in terms of features, functions, price and value, it s easier than you think to put a value on service. When things go bump in the night, and they will, a must-haves someone available 24x7 to help when the chips are down. We ve all experienced Murphy s Law, so we know outages and issues happen at the most inappropriate time and you ll want to leverage your staff for anything BUT infrastructure issues when things go bump in the night. A Network Operations Center (NOC) is a staff of personnel to troubleshoot and triage problems and issues that arise. Infrastructure within a datacenter, as well as the datacenter itself is highly electromechanical,which means it will fail. It s just a matter of when and only when it does fail will you have a true appreciation of having someone available in the middle of the night who has your back staff you can use as leverage for their expertise. For do-it-yourselfers, staffing for this means that you will need personnel with a variety of skill-sets (X3) to over all the shifts. In terms of budget, staffing should be 60-70% of the budget for a datacenter project. Once you put those numbers on a spreadsheet and show them to your CFO, you ll quickly realize why so many companies are adopting cloud technologies because they understand the fully-loaded Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of the equation.

9 CONCLUSIONS So, with all of these considerations, the answer to build or rent should be obvious. If you would like to hear from companies that have been through this once (or several times), please reach out to LightBound and we ll put you in touch with them. They ve done the homework which may lighten your load when the question comes up. CONTACT US FOR MORE INFORMATION ON HOW OUR DATACENTERS CAN ENHANCE YOUR BUSINESS LIGHTBOUND DATACENTERS PHONE: P W. Henry Street, Suite 200 Indianapolis, IN LIGHTBOUND.COM