DATA CENTER

Designing Data Center infrastructure: indispensable for guaranteeing security, reliability, availability and scalability.

“If a Company lacks real time access to information useful for conducting business, this leads to decisions or productive processes being impeded”.
This statement underlines the importance of the concept of Business Continuity, that is, an uninterrupted flow of information. Business Continuity means “Reliability” and “Availability” of components that make up the system. For an IT Manager this concept represents an objective and an operational strategy. Too often, however, the concepts of “Reliability” and “Availability” relate only to hardware components and to software applications, neglecting the infrastructure that contains these, the Data Center. The history of the Data Center is the history of the information systems whose architecture has been centralized, then distributed and today again centralized. In the past “the Engine Room” of the Data Processing Center contained complex equipment like mainframes, control units, disks, tapes and printers whose installation followed strictly from the specifications dictated by the makers like IBM, Bull, Hitachi, Amdhal. In the majority of cases the equipment producing companies saw to the design and fitting of the rooms basing themselves on a competence derived from a perfect knowledge of their own products. Over the years the trend turned to information systems that became increasingly complex with applications installed on server units; this gave rise to an exponential growth in the density of equipment leading in many cases to a disregard of the environmental context. Hardware of ever smaller dimensions and ever greater power have led to an increase in factors such as electrical energy consumption and heat loss, which affect the state of the physical body containing it. According to an investigation by “Gartner”, by 2008 50% of current Data Centers will not have enough electrical energy and refrigeration capacity to cope with the high density of equipment. This is a frighteningly worrying figure. The EIA/TIA 942 standard, published in April 2005, which sets out guidelines to direct professionals towards a new approach to designing and building a Data Center. The standard takes into account factors such as:

• physical location
• architectural design
• distribution of electrical energy
• data cabling system
• physical and logical protection
• access management
• detection and fighting of fires
• monitoring functional parameters.

The document pays particular attention to how the dimensions of such elements should not be planned individually, rather they should be integrated into a global design, that is, their specifications should be evaluated and set in the context of all the other interactions. The indispensable condition for this is that all the professionals involved in the designing collaborate fruitfully pooling their resources of expertise in the interests of reducing the systems' down-time resulting from breakdowns or possible human errors, while respecting criteria of future scalability and reducing running costs.

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