 | Facilities: including building,
security, power, air conditioning and room for growth
| Internet connectivity: performance,
availability and scalability
| Data center management: monitoring,
support, and troubleshooting
| | |
The aim is to provide customers with the
physical environment, server hardware, network connectivity and technical
management skills necessary to keep Internet businesses up and running 24 hours
a day, 7 days a week. The ability to scale is essential, allowing businesses to
upgrade easily by adding bandwidth or server capacity on demand.
Designing
Facility Infrastructure
Building Layout
Most buildings constructed in the last 10 years have been built with
consideration for the requirements of computers and their support. Floor design
and layout for housing the servers should be related to the target market sector
and price of the service. Floor layout is almost always a trade-off between
security, rack density, revenue potential, and manageability.
To offer a wider choice of services to
meet customer requirements, while at the same time maximizing efficiency in
cabling, it is recommended that the floor layout be broken down into technical
suites and racking neighborhoods. The major benefits of this approach are
scaling and flexibility.
Power Specification
Main power to an Internet data center should be supplied by the regional
electric power utility. To reduce reliance on one feed, separate feeds into the
building are recommended. Once inside the building, the power should be
distributed via at least two means to the individual technical suites and other
protected areas. It is strongly recommended that a minimum of 300W per square
meter be provided to all technical suites.
Hosting companies can differentiate
themselves on the quality of their power resilience. At a minimum, two-fold
resilience should be provided in the form of uninterruptible power supplies
(UPS) to each area or neighborhood. Additionally, diesel generator backup should
start automatically within seconds after a main power source failure.
Building Security and Access Control
Building and network security is a highly visible component of service and very
important to customers. With that in mind, a robust security policy supported by
a workable set of procedures, skills and tools is essential. The security policy
must manage access to the data center and monitor activity within the building.
This activity is normally needed 24 hours a day, every day of the year.
Physical access to technical suites and
other areas of the building should be controlled and monitored on an ongoing
basis, preferably by a swipe card facility to maintain and control access to
restricted areas.
Fire Control
The building must be protected by a fully automated fire detection and
suppression system before damage occurs. All technical suites should be equipped
with FM200 (or equivalent) gaseous extinguishing systems, to provide rapid
discharge and flame suppression in the event of a fire, while minimizing damage
to equipment and reducing danger to personnel.
Air Conditioning
Equipment performance and life span can be significantly improved by housing the
system under optimum environmental conditions. Typically, this should be around
a constant 68° F., plus or minus 3° F., with humidity at a constant 45%-50%.
System Infrastructure
Designing network access into the data center requires significant commercial
and competitive consideration—greater resilience is gained by having multiple
carriers (telco & ISP). Products such as caching technologies, load
balancers and switches should be reviewed and deployed.
When evaluating server platforms, it is
absolutely essential that they provide seamless interoperability with the
operating systems, development tools and applications needed to run a successful
data center.
Data Center
Management
A Service Management Center (SMC) is the core of the data center facility,
providing systems management for all managed services and monitoring for the
network. Correctly set up and managed, the SMC provides first-level support for
all alerts, incidents and problems, first-level contact for customers with the
data center, direct feedback to customers on incident and problem resolution,
and dedicated network management and monitoring.
The SMC should be located within the data
center itself and staffed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Outside of core support
hours, the SMC staff should still provide initial logging and first-level
support, with technical support staff providing second- and third-level support
on an on-call basis.
Service Monitoring and Maintenance
The major selling point for dedicated managed services is the ability to provide
standard service monitoring facilities and to offer customers more proactive
monitoring and auto-correction of faults. This requires the deployment of the
appropriate monitoring tools and software. These services can be provided on a
chargeable basis, with customers paying a monthly fee to have the tasks carried
out over and above the basic monitoring package.
Customer System Backups
Backups should only be provided for managed services. Furthermore, in order to
be effective, it is essential that any backup solution deployed is capable of
backing up files and tables that may be open at the time the backup is made.
Problem, Configuration and Change
Management
Problem, configuration and change management are vital to the successful
implementation of any managed service environment. Problem management, through
the implementation of a Call Management System (CMS), enables the Service
Management Center to log, track and resolve incidents either as they occur or as
customers report them.
Through the implementation of a
Configuration Management Database (CMDB), updates and changes to individual
configurations can be tracked. Change Management enables correct logging and
implementation of hardware and software upgrades, changes to the operational
parameters in the data center, and changes to monitoring services.
Putting It
Together
Data center customers expect a physical and technical environment that offers
the highest levels of reliability and flexibility. Accordingly, the Internet
data center must provide the physical environment, network connectivity,
technical skills and server hardware necessary to keep Internet servers up and
running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
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