Category Archive for : ‘Hardened Data Center’

Disasters such as fire, flood, storm, lightning or even sabotage can happen anywhere at any time and with no warning. Fortunately, the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) prescribes codes for fire safety and protection. It is compulsory to adhere to these codes, and failing to do so could attract government penalties. In the context of data centers, some of the codes applicable are:

NFPA 70E: Electrical Safety in the Workplace.

NFPA 72: Automatic fire detection and signaling system.

NFPA 75: Protection of IT equipment (servers, storage, cables, cooling equipment, power) and its adjoining areas.

NFPA

Mother Nature’s power continues, as we saw with the recent tornadoes in Oklahoma. The May 2013 tornado that hit the Oklahoma City suburb of Moore was reported to be a full-fledged F5 tornado creating havoc and destruction.

There are on an average 1200 tornadoes per year in the United States. Since 1950, there have been around 60 EF5 tornadoes, with the states of Oklahoma and Alabama being the worse hit with seven tornadoes each.

For those wondering what an F5 tornado is, here are the details.

The Enhanced Fujita Tornado Damage Scale (EF1 to EF5) was

Data center facilities are a critical when your computer systems play a part in your everyday operations. But you cannot simply set up a data center facility anywhere – there are a lot of things you need to keep in mind. This is especially true for data centers that are engaged in handling mission critical business applications. So, how do facility managers evaluate a potential location for setting up a data center facility?

The following location parameters are often considered when choosing a data center location:

Proximity to IT support
For better control,

Loss of data is an unacceptable circumstance whether you run an enterprise data center or a small computer room. Our data is now protected by state-of-the-art technology, high-tech equipment, modern facilities and 24×7 monitoring. Losing data seems unthinkable. Unfortunately, natural disasters can create data center disasters.

But the fact remains that disaster does strike – Hurricane Sandy gave data center managers many sleepless nights. So, what are the some of the worst possible disasters that can strike a data center and how can you prepare for them?

Fire

The reason fire is at

Do Midwest centers offer an advantage? Is it better to use a Midwest colocation facility rather than the facilities in Northern Virginia, North Carolina, or Atlanta?

The answer is totally dependent of your organization’s criteria for a data center. In six years of conversations with potential customers, I’ve seen many of the same concerns surface when it comes to geographic data center locations:

Common considerations

How far is the Midwest data center location from my IT staff?
What is the cost of data center power?
Is the facility a hardened data center built to address

Thinking about moving a data center? Many organizations are. A few things are driving this trend:

Uptime – Uptime is more important than it used to be. More businesses “bet the business” on the availability of their computer systems. The costs of data center downtime can be high: lost credibility, lost revenue and lost clients.

Moving the office – The buyers market for office space is appealing to many companies. And along with the office move, the old enterprise data center in the converted office in the back room has to move

Can affordable colocation deliver 99.995% uptime? Does it make financial sense for you to move either your enterprise data center or your disaster recovery center to a colocation facility? And can the result of that move to colocation improve your uptime?

The answer is: do the math. You need to do the research necessary to determine if moving to an outsourced data center can be both affordable and deliver high uptime.

First, consider the uptime in your current data center. How many power feeds come into your building from the utility? How

Data center management is a broad term. In many data centers, management can be split into two broad categories:

Information technology
Mission critical facilities

Information technology is the management of everything in the racks: network, servers, storage, security appliances, operating systems and appliances.

Mission critical facilities is everything that surrounds the equipment in the racks: power feeds, generators, UPS systems, data center cooling , hardened data center buildings, physical security, and telecommunications access.

The driving force behind this management is normally data center reliability, or data center uptime. Most organizations are increasing their dependence on

In this info-rich post, Rich Miller (Data Center Knowledge) talks about there wheres and whys of proliferation of data centers in certain areas. His classification of data centers into three major categories is spot on.

The first building at Facebook’s data center campus in Oregon, built on a high plain above the small town of Prineville (Population: 10,000).

The changing shape of the Internet can be seen in a three-hour drive across the mountains and plains of western Oregon. The drive winds up and around Mount Hood, and across miles of wilderness

Why do hardened data center facilities matter? Hardened data centers reduce the risk of a prolonged outage due to natural and man-made disasters.

On the west coast, data centers are hardened by a number of different technologies to withstand the frequent shaking of earthquakes. In the Midwest, hardened data center facilities protect against natural disasters such as tornadoes. F5 tornado resistant data centers protect your mission critical facilities and equipment from natural disasters.

Although the risk of a natural disaster is low, the risk of a prolonged outage in a natural disaster