Most small and medium sized business are taking advantage of
the cloud for their technical needs and moving away from buying and maintaining
servers. However, many medium and large
enterprise companies find economies of scale when building their own clouds.
However, when building your own cloud you need a safe and secure place to store
the servers and infrastructure that isn't a basement or closet. Enter the data
center.
Data centers come in all shapes and sizes. But are
essentially secure locations to store and manage your servers and other IT
infrastructure. The market is saturated with telecom carriers and hosting
providers competing for colocation clients. As your business considers
colocation there are five key areas to consider when evaluating data centers
and colocation providers such as nology:
1. Geographic Location.
Typically collocations are chosen as primary and disaster
recovery sites. As such, clients should understand the natural environmental
threats in the region, such as earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes,
blizzards/hail storms and flooding and how the data center stands up to such
threats. You’ll need to know if the facility is located in a flood plain, a
flight path or in a seismic fault zone.
2. Security, Compliance and Regulatory Controls.
What degree of physical security is offered? These elements
include a fenced defensible perimeter, traffic bollards or car traps,
guard-controlled gated entry, 24/7 on-site guard and video surveillance. Other
procedural security elements to check for are customer-defined access lists,
visitor tracking, biometric screening, mantraps and locking cabinets/cages.
Regulatory compliance is of growing concern if you must
adhere to government-mandated regulatory constraints. Depending on your industry,
you should inquire about Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act
(HIPAA), Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard, Federal
Information Security Management Act (FISMA) and Statements on Standards for
Attestation Engagements No. 1 (SSAE 16) compliance in order to match them to a
provider holding these certifications.
3. Critical Systems.
Power, cooling, fire suppression infrastructure and
associated monitoring software — together these critical systems are the most
telling measurements of uptime, yet the least understood.
Power is king in a data center environment. How much and how
it’s handled are key. Power has three components: core power, critical power
and uninterrupted conditioned power.
Core power: The total capacity available at the data center.
There should be at least two separate feeds and ideally, but not usually, each
feed will come from a different power grid. In the case of nology’s data center
core power comes from two different Xcel grids.
Critical power:
Essentially backup power. How is the center designed to failover from
utility power to batteries and generators and how long will such backups last in
the event the utility power is lost?
Uninterrupted conditioned power: This is the bank of
batteries responsible for cleaning and conditioning the utility power before it
is delivered to customer racks to ensure zero interruption. Also ensure there
are at least two redundant sources.
Other questions to ask: How long will the batteries sustain
the load until the generators fire up and sync? How often the batteries are
replaced and to what extent are they monitored?
In addition to power, there's air conditioning and fire suppression.
You need to ensure that there is sufficient cooling to keep your equipment
running efficiently and if the fire suppression system is wet or dry. A wet
fire suppression system could ruin your equipment in the event of a fire.
4. Network Connectivity.
What options does the data center offer for connectivity to
the outside world? Is the facility carrier neutral, meaning do they allow you
to shop and chose your own provider or must you buy internet bandwidth directly
from them? In both cases what type of failovers are available in the event of
an ISP outage?
5. Service and Support.
Last but not least is the consideration of available support
services. Does the data center offer troubleshooting services? What about
contracted managed services, such as hardware/OS, database, application,
security, storage and tape backup? Is there a 24/7 on-site operations
staff? How do they bill for "remote
hands" services?
Knowledge and understanding of these key areas will enable
you to make a sound decision in your colocation provider.
Find out more about nology's colocation offering and schedule a tour with one of our Cloud Integration Specialists: Colocation Minneapolis
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