Establishing a secure, fully redundant data center requires a commitment to ongoing maintenance and support, not to mention a major capital investment.
This article will tell you all you need to know about building a data center.
Network and Power Accessibility
Power and network join forces to form any data center’s backbone.
A data center is useless without access to reliable connectivity or commercial power.
While there may be a power grid in your region, you should consider the location of the main power station in relation to where you’ll set up your data center.
Proximity to Workforce and Customers
It’s best to set up your data center near your customer base.
A lot of applications require minimal latency and fast response times.
What is more, some companies find security and comfort in the ability to physically access, touch, and see their IT environment.
Facility and Area Considerations
Do you want to set your center up in an already existing building or build it from the ground up?
Is the area you’re looking at near an airport or accessible by road? Is there room for expansion?
Are there tax breaks your clients could benefit from?
Does the local government offer any tax incentives if you choose a certain city?
Infrastructure
The most important and urgent thing to do is order circuits because this can take a long time – more specifically up to 120 business days including installation.
Without a circuit, it’s impossible to copy data. You might only need to order one from your office to your provider’s location. Bandwidth volume is important to consider.
You need as much as possible because your center will grow.
Every data center operator wants to improve infrastructure design and planning and run operations more effectively.
A new type of business software that can make this happen is DCIM. DCIM software normally replaces Visio, Excel, and locally developed databases.
You need as many resources as possible because you are going to be installing many databases.
To carry out all of the installations, you’ll have to coordinate with available resources.
Especially in terms of big data sets, it’s recommended to use real-time databases designed for fast analytics like Druid Architecture.
Data Center Categorization
Data centers are categorized according to a special tier system.
There are four tiers, with the highest designating maximum availability.
This would be Tier 4, denoting what is considered a fault-tolerant data center.
These data centers have infrastructure that can withstand a minimum of one fault.
Normally, all of the center’s parts are redundant. The duration of outages per year will be less than half an hour because guaranteed availability is almost 100%.
A Tier III ranking ensures that any planned maintenance can be performed with minimal downtime.
These centers have enough backup capacity through different routes, although an infrastructure error can bring a part down. Total outage time per year is 95 minutes.
Tier II centers feature redundant components, equaling outage duration of up to 22 hours per year.
This is because the data center has N+1 redundancy of components – AC, UPS, or routers, and just one distribution canal.
Finally, the most basic data centers have both generators and UPS, but no redundant backup.
Outages can reach 30 hours a year. Moreover, they can occur during planned technical maintenance.
Choosing a Provider
When choosing a provider, opt for one with multiple locations so you can use their network to transfer data from one location to another.
Another reason for this is you’ll need a mailing address for your data center circuits. You can also store your data safely online with firms like Firmex.
Choosing a Cabling Vendor
You need a cabling vendor to be involved in design and development. Cabling has become a highly specialized engineering solution that necessitates solid expertise.
Your vendor of choice should know how to design the cabling for the software and equipment to be acquired.
Ask the vendor if your storage, computer, network, security, and firewall team can operate in the cage when his own team is working.
You’ll find some cabling vendors require exclusive location use. In this case, your team won’t be able to work at the data center, posing the risk of task slippage.
It’s always possible to reach an agreement with cabling vendors for both teams to be onsite at the same time.
The Right Business Software for your Data Center
On a final note, business software that supports integrated network management platforms will help service providers, large enterprises, and SMEs manage their IT infrastructure and data centers in a cost-effective manner.
Additionally, it will also ensure operations are less time-consuming. It will offer physical and virtual server monitoring, network performance monitoring, traffic analysis, firewall log management, configuration management, and IP address management.
It should provide email and SMS alerts, business view, workflow automation, a combined snapshot view, and customized reports.
When selecting business software, these are the features to look for.
