24/7 availability. How?

Keeping data and applications safe and available at all times is not an easy task. There are many features of a data center that enable it to do so. Some of them include modularity, scalability, flexibility, redundancy and better manageability. 

Modularity: “The modularity of data center helps it to scale up, adapt to new hardware technologies that the infrastructure needs and change in capacity”. It is much easier to scale up a modular data center as the different modules in it are well defined and administrators can focus on a single module thereby also reducing the risk of bringing down the entire data center while trying to scale up. Modularity also makes it easier to relocate the data center, as each module can be separately ripped apart and reconstructed without effecting the operations of the rest of the data center.

Scalability: Nobody can predict the future, going by the same quote no organization can precisely predict what will be its exact data storage needs in the times to come, they cannot predict how many application they might have to run using the same data center. A data center answers this unpredictability by offering scalability. A well-planned data center always has room for scalability. This gives an organization room for expanding their capabilities to hold more amounts of data. This can be done by adding more capacity drives to existing servers, getting in more servers and putting them in the existing racks or even bringing in more racks.

Flexibility: Flexibility comes from modularity and scalability. A data center must be flexible enough to accommodate technological changes and advances. For example these days blade servers are picking up in terms of popularity, as they allow you to save on a lot of space. So now migrating from the existing rack infrastructure to a blade server scenario would become much easier if your data center structure is modular, which in turn makes it scalable and flexible.

Visited site: Net4India, Data Center, Delhi Jasjit Sawhney, CEO and Desi Valli, Director-Technical  & Operations Net4India has got a data center in Delhi, which is one of the many centers they have in India. This center caters to the needs of 50-60 clients. They offer hosting as well as server co-location services.  This setup is a rack-based system, including some co-located pedestal servers. The security setup includes smart card identification for the employees and a biometric scanner as well. They have a SAN for storage purpose, and a robotic arm based tape backup device, which takes the back up automatically. For power backup they have a UPS and two generators. For fire protection they have fireproof walls and manual fire-fighting equipment.

Redundancy: Redundancy is required at every level in a data center. Data has be backed up at every stage, so that the dependency on a single system for data and application availability is eliminated. There must be servers backing up the live system so that in case something goes wrong with the live system then the backup takes over and there is no down time. Then there has to be a disaster recovery site for the entire data center, this is in case all the data is lost owing to a disaster then your data is still safe. A lot of organizations keep their disaster recovery sites at a remote location away from their running data center or outsource it to a service provider.

Security: One of the prime purposes of a data center is to keep your data and application secure. Security measures such as biometric systems keep the data center safe from intruders trying to physically access the center. And a combination of various network monitoring and security packages keep the network safe.

Manageability: Consolidation of all servers under one roof and under one monitoring system makes it easier to manage the data center. Also the servers are more conveniently placed at one place for physical access.