INTELLIGENT DATA CENTRES
connection or utility substation nearby that
ensures that uninterrupted power is available
for the data centre? What is its distance to
the nearest highway, urban city, airport,
nuclear plant, important infrastructure, that
needs to be balanced in terms of remoteness,
accessibility and proximity as required?
3
Design
An important attribute inside a
data centre is not just how much existing
equipment is stacked and how it is stacked,
but also how new equipment will be stacked
and configured. What are the options
available to bring in new equipment in
terms of individual cabinets, cages with
racks, data modules and private rooms?
And once decided how the equipment will
be stacked and configured, what is the
availability of power and cooling per square
area of space leased.
Does the data centre follow raised floors
and cooling below with equipment racks
directly secured to the concrete floor slabs?
This is usually an important consideration
for heavy and sensitive equipment. Other
parameters to validate during selection are
cooling efficiency, power density per rack,
modular approach to build up, and just in
time space expansion.
Lastly, what is the availability of
temporary office space when employees from
end-customer organisations are expected to
function on-site.
4
Connectivity
The best advantages for an endcustomer are when the data centre offers the
choice of network connectivity from multiple
service providers and from multiple landing
points. This allows the end-customer to
become less susceptible to latency issues that
may arise from time to time with specific
providers and through specific routes.
The ideal situation arises when the data
centre provides direct connectivity to service
providers they are contracted with. As well
as the option of bringing in other service
providers on demand without any specific
preferences or bias towards any of them. This
is sometimes referred to as carrier neutrality.
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5
Operations
Auditing the physical attributes of a data
centre is usually one side of the selection
process. The other side is the human audit.
How well does a data centre go to reduce
human errors? Are the processes and
procedures of operation documented? How
well are the staff trained on these processes
and procedures? Are the processes flexible
enough and is change management built into
the data centre operations? How does the
data centre manage service level agreements,
maintenance schedules, and planned
downtime?
Datacenters compliant with Tier III and
Tier IV levels have redundant and fault
tolerant capacities inbuilt and hence should
rarely have any downtime. But data centres
compliant with Tier I and Tier II levels will
need to go through planned downtime and
will need to actively manage their service
level agreements accordingly.
A data centre is also a business and the
stability of the business model, shareholders,
and profitability is an important part of the
consideration.
equipment is an important operational
procedure. This covers end of life
replacement, selection of new equipment,
and incorporation of redundant equipment.
Critical equipment is usually UPS devices,
generators, switchgear, chillers, utility
connections, control monitoring systems.
Another key aspect is the presence of Data
Center Infrastructure Management that can
alert when there is a reduction in planned
availability and reliability in real time.
Finally, most data centres tend to offer
their own share of hosted IT solutions and
going forward this may increasingly become
the final point of differentiation.
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Other factors
Physical security is an integral part
of the operations with varying degrees
of importance for every data centre. This
usually includes surveillance, biometrics
and two factor authentication. Similarly,
commissioning and maintenance of critical
Sachin Bhardwaj is Director, Marketing and
Business Development, eHosting DataFort
Issue 01
INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS