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own security team or have the same level of redundancy that pertain in larger facilities .
Micro data centres are often colocated with their users , and rooms are often unsecured and racks are less highly organised . Older network enclosures may be open to greater numbers of people , and cable management is less stringent with cable clutter and obstructions to airflow within racks — leading to cooling problems — and increased human error during adds moves and changes . In these cases there is often no redundancy of critical power and cooling systems , no dedicated cooling and no monitoring by specialist DCIM ( data centre infrastructure management ) software .
The applications hosted locally may be used by only a minority of staff but they are also more likely to be proprietary applications , specific to the organisation and critical to the businesses wellbeing . Therefore , when calculating the overall availability of IT services it is important to take into account the variance
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between the different data centres so that one can attain a true picture of the strength or vulnerability of its IT assets .
Take the holistic view
Recent research carried out by Schneider Electric proposes that the overall availability of IT services to an organisation should be based off of a holistic view of the organisation ’ s data centres , and that a scorecard methodology be adopted so that a dashboard can be drawn up depicting system-level availability . This produces metrics showing that the relatively poorer levels of availability from smaller sites can have a disproportionately large effect on overall IT availability .
For example , a user might be dependent on applications hosted by two data centres ; one a centralised Tier 3 facility with
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‘ Data centres have redundancy in their critical power and cooling systems to avoid downtime due to failure or maintenance activities .’ |
an availability of 99.98 per cent and 1.6 hours of downtime and the other a local Tier 1 site with 99.67 per cent availability and 28.8 hours of downtime . The total availability rating of the two systems in series ( meaning a failure occurs if either system fails ) is the product of the two systems ’ availabilities , or 99.65 per cent ( 99.98 * 99.67 ) resulting in a total downtime of 30.7 hours .
The good news is that with measurement , management and visibility of the downtime potential , companies can implement steps to improve availability throughout an organisation . A different approach is needed to traditional methods . In the past , failure occurred when a piece of equipment was impacted ; in today ’ s world failure occurs when a user ’ s experience is impacted .
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March 2017 | 11 |