Striving for perfection in the data center world

As the demands on data centers continue to grow along with advances in technology, there will come a time that perfection will be expected, according to one of the speakers at the Dell World conference recently.

“For data centers, the idea that you need to be perfect will not be far from the truth,” technology futurist Michael Rogers told attendees.

In plain speak, that means your data center uptime will be expected to be virtually 100 percent by 2020, according to an article published by TechTarget. Those demands have grown significantly just in the past 10 years, with the advent of smartphones, social media, tablets, and other innovations. And that was only the start, with new technology innovations appearing nearly daily.

As a result of society’s increasing reliance on data centers, Rogers said, they will need to provide the type of reliability that has been expected of power plants. Even more so, he pointed out.

So, what does that mean for data center operations? Here are some key solutions to consider:

Spread the risk of an outage. Deploy your infrastructure in more than one location to significantly minimize the risks caused by an outage occurring in one location — either caused by a fire, a natural disaster, or another event.

Keep records of failures. Downtime caused by human error happens. Keep track of them and set up a strategic plan on how to avoid them in the future, whether it can be traced to operating procedures with cooling systems, connectivity or other issues.

Set up adequate monitoring. In a Data Center Knowledge article, Pete Mastin of Cedexis says this is the area that many architects miss — the monitoring of applications, along with deploying a global load balancing based on real-timer performance. He said it’s the key to 100 percent uptime. “All too often we see applications having performance issues because the monitoring solution used is measuring the wrong things or perhaps the right things but too infrequently.”

Lifeline Data Centers, a wholesale colocation center, has a long history of helping our clients maintain a high rate of uptime. Take a virtual tour of our facility to see how we do it.

Other resources:

• Infographic: The 22 Data Center Compliance Acronyms You Need to Know
• White Paper: Why Data Center Compartmentalization is Important
• Lifeline One Sheet: What You Need to Know About Lifeline Data Centers

Alex Carroll

Managing Member at Lifeline Data Centers

Alex, co-owner, is responsible for all real estate, construction and mission critical facilities: hardened buildings, power systems, cooling systems, fire suppression, and environmentals. Alex also manages relationships with the telecommunications providers and has an extensive background in IT infrastructure support, database administration and software design and development. Alex architected Lifeline’s proprietary GRCA system and is hands-on every day in the data center.