5 Important Facts about High Availability Data Center Design

As the datacenters become more and more essential to enterprise applications, there’s a rise in the concerns about datacenter reliability and its availability. Redundancy is considered to be an important factor for infrastructure reliability by industry experts, but it’s not the only factor; what’s more important is the need to keep the design and actual requirements of enterprises in sync.  

Having redundancy more than is needed can lead to unnecessary expenditures obstructing the path to high reliability. So, it becomes imperative that missions and needs of companies are aligned with data center performance.

Here are some important facts affecting availability that must be kept in mind:

1.Increasing redundancy may notalways be the right thing to do

Actual reliability comes with the designing datacenter according to application needs and not by furthering infrastructure redundancy; as it doesn’t make a system more reliable. In fact, reliability lowers at a point when redundancy is increased greatly; and the reason for this is the enhanced system complexity and difficulty to manage it.

2.Tier IV costs 2X more than Tier II design

It isn’t any wise to just design and build the reliable infrastructure that would be affordable considering redundancy costs, it must be supporting the applications well too. There doesn’t lies much difference between Tier I & Tier II as is the case for Tier III and Tier IV. However, there’s huge difference in the way Tier II & Tier III are designed. That’s why Tier IV costs are nearly double compared to that of Tier II design.

3. 2(N+1) UPS Configurations aren’t any more reliable than 2N one

You would expect 2(N+1) generators to be more reliable than 2N UPS design but that’s not how it works in reality. They both have the same failure probability without much difference in operation. So, this is another example where redundancy is not directly proportional to the reliability.

4. 2N generator configuration is slightly reliable than the N+1

Between 2N and N+1 generator configurations, there’s considerable difference in observed availability. Failure probability difference is (1.5-4.41) % and 2.94% respectively. You don’t really need to go for prime rated generators instead if you want to meet Tier-IV standards as standby generator would suffice. Usually, Uptime demands generators to run even during maintenance that all the major generator manufacturers do provide.  

5. Generators do hit problems when run for longer time durations

In a lab research, it was discovered that 15 % emergency diesel generators failed after 8 hours of continuous operation; 1% failed after 24 hours; 5% failed after 0.5 hour; and 2% simply failed to start. So, the generator redundancy is crucial as the generators have tendency to fail. When they are run for longer period of hours, the generators hit a snag leading to its failure.

Conclusion

To sum up, reliability isn’t solely governed by redundancy factors and Uptime tier systems. Other important factors that come into play for high availability datacenter design are site age and location, building construction, equipments’ quality, commissioning process, operations and maintenance practices, personnel training and more. And not to forget, the concept of redundancy for reliability is somewhat related to the infrastructure design and not on the whole.

10 Interesting Facts to Know About Data Centers

Data center is basically a center with loads of sensitive and modern computer equipments that basically manages all the data of an organization.

An organization can compromise with interior of their company but definitely not with quality of data servers and other equipments because these days it’s a necessary prerequisite as the best server/ computer equipments you have, the more customers you will have.

With almost every company going on cloud to cut down the resources and time they are spending earlier to maintain the data network outsourcing, the data work is the easiest thing to do where the core business of company isn’t affected. 

With so much demand of data centers, here are some interesting facts to know about data center:

1. There are around 5, 09,147 data centers in the world and the total area it acquires is 28,58,31,541 sq ft. nearly that is equivalent to 5,955 football fields.

2. In 2015, 1.2 trillion GB of data got created that is equivalent to 75 Billion 16GB iPods. Roughly every person on earth will have around 10 iPods.

3. The world’s biggest data center is based in Chicago, and is backed up by 53 generators. It utilizes 8.5 million gallons of cooling fluid per year. It is 1.1 million square fit in size and was converted to telecom used back in 1999.

4. The amount of internet online shopping per hour of whole world is equal to GDP of Bulgaria.

5. EPRI says - "For every watt of computer power consumed by a data center, it takes another watt to cool it". Which means around 5-10 MW of power just for cooling a data center.

6. Nowadays even Data centers are highly secured as all the data of banks, companies; govt. organizations are stored at one place. These days, data server companies automatically switch data from one center to another so that no one can know which data is available in which center.

7. Data centers are cooled with cooling fluids and Air conditioners that leaves around 17% carbon footprint.

8. Data center more than 7 years old are considered to be out of date as per green computing norms’ that’s why after every two years, equipment is upgraded to maintain the efficiency of data servers.

9.    Google has 12 data centers all over the planet, 6 of which are in North America. Recent estimations predict that Google has more than 900,000 servers in its data centers around the world in all.

10. Enough information is consumed on internet every hour that can stack up 7 billion DVDs that they had scaled Mt. Everest 95 times.

These days with the E-commerce market scaling up high and startup culture blooming in India, servers are one of the crucial factors which will keep you ahead of competitors.

About Us- RackBank® DataCenters is a Tier-3 Data Center in India located in Indore. Since our inception in 2013 by Mr. Narendra Sen, we have been providing best-in-class premium data center services including dedicated server hosting, managed and unmanaged services and colocation services in India. Our datacenter is spread across 35,000 sq ft of land and has a capacity of 2500+ servers and is especially favourable for start-ups due to its cost-effectiveness.

Internet of Things (IoT) - Its Growing Impact on Data Centers

We are living in times where Internet of Things is keeping us all wirelessly wired and so connected every moment. To name a few, IoT objects like smart devices, smart homes and wearables is what everyone is looking forward to. It is revolutionizing the way people do and understand things and business by greatly influencing the industries and the world at large in the most unimaginable ways.

As Internet of Things has made an evolutionary leap from ‘Internet of Things’ to getting its new name as ‘Internet of Everything’, it has come a long way and still continues to be one of the major driver in taking technology industry forward. So as we see IoT playing a big role, the massive amount of data bits will keep gushing through datacenter creating ample opportunities for data center industry to play even a bigger role.

What Underlying Opportunities & Challenges IoT is bringing for Data Centers?

As per a Gartner report, it was stated that,

“IoT will have 25 Billion connected Units by 2020 growing approximately 5 times of what it is now in 2015 i.e. 4.9 billion connected things”.

Also, a Forrester report says that, “More than 82 percent of businesses are going to be on IoT applications by 2017”.

Above two instances show us quite clearly how IoT and Data Center are poised to form a closer and stronger connect.

And with such surge, billions of data points are continuously forming due to these IoT objects which in return requires huge storage for storing, processing and analyzing them. Also, with more and more applications being based on Internet of Things that includes the booming "smart home" market accompanying predictive analytics, would accelerate data center demands.

So the data centers would play a crucial role in interconnecting all the active components, together with chillers, UPS systems, PDUs, cooling units, etc, where a data center admin would monitor and supervise their combined functioning.

Also, the new and existing data center vendors would have to include and build IoT-aware infrastructure and capacity management platforms in their services portfolio to avoid any upsetting of uptime, bandwidth or similar parameters.

Apart from this, huge chunks of data processing will go up in direct proportion to workloads creating bottlenecks for data center providers such as capacity, security and analytics. This would call for an efficient system management platform with multiplying growth in network connections, storage capacity, server expansions giving a fillip to distributed data center management approach.

The Road Ahead

To sum it up, Internet of Things is indubitably giving rise to a host of opportunities to data centers to move, store, process and analyze the data generated by IoT translating it into useful business insights.

Though, it would take handsome amount of time to execute it all as the most datacenters currently don’t have proper systems and infrastructure ready to make the most of the data being produced.  

Henceforth, the Data center hardware and software services market will have to calculatively and strategically handle such data upsurge that witnesses a breakneck growth of IoT industry now and in time to come.