Adequate Data Center Solutions: What to look for

Data centers are installations designed to keep servers, networking hardware, telecommunications infrastructure and associated systems within a controlled environment. These installations are built to withstand environmental disasters of most kind. To ensure continuous functioning, they have uninterrupted power supplies provided by redundant power sources; these are in the form of battery banks that provide power allowing for the main generators to kick in. These facilities are built to be highly functional and highly resilient in all aspects. Due to the sensitive nature of their operations and the high volume of data stored and processed by these data centers, security is usually a top priority in their design.

In modern designing different type of data center solutions to minimize security risks and breaches have been implemented; one of them being the dark data center. Alternatively called the ‘lights-out’ data center these facilities are fully automated requiring very little human input and access. They can be installed away from urban centers and require very little manpower to manage. Due to the high set-up and maintenance cost of a data center, a business may find it easier to lease the services of one or rent floor space in an already setup data center.

A good data center leasing solution should be examined with the following in mind:

• Availability, reliability and cost of power: Data centers are huge facilities that consume massive amounts of energy in extremely short periods of time. Furthermore, they are constantly running. This means that the first consideration is whether there is adequate and reliable energy where the data center is located; this is why large companies who set up data centers usually go for areas with cheap abundant energy.
• IT Security: the facility should have adequate security to prevent data loss, theft and security breaches. This should be factored into the design of the installation also, and only authorized personnel should have access to all the servers contained there.
• Adequacy of redundancies: backup systems or redundancies are the lifeline of a data center. The first are energy redundancies; these are backup power systems with automatic switch-over capabilities that prevent the data center from going offline. The next are data storage redundancies; the data stored in the servers must have a full backup that ensure hardware failure does not cripple services.
• There should be platform redundancies, which make sure that the virtualization systems used to provide services to the clients are available even where the software on the main system crashes.