Why Colocation is a Viable Option for Small Business Owners
February 29, 2012 by Kara Manon · Leave a Comment
Colocation – locating servers and high-tech equipment away from the bricks-and-mortar location of a business – is no longer just for the big boys of the data world. It’s also becoming an emerging consideration for small- to mid-sized business owners.
Many small business owners find themselves burdened and overwhelmed with the task of keeping a server running 24/7 for their business and Internet hosting needs. Colocation facilities at a data center can provide small and mid-sized business owners peace of mind about their IT needs with state-of-the-art security, safety, performance and reliability at a price that is more economical than one might think.
Common colocation services include:
- lockable rack cabinets or cages
- power in a variety of formats
- network connectivity
- proper cooling and ventilation
- physical security, including video surveillance and key card access
- real-time, live monitoring of all systems
A Data Center by Design: Lightning Strikes
February 20, 2012 by Barry Czachura · Leave a Comment
They Always Told Me That Lightning Never Strikes in the Same Place Twice.
Wow, were THEY ever wrong!
No other force in nature combines the ethereal beauty and incredible power of lightning. It is so fascinating and mesmerizing that it is easy to forget how dangerous it can be for both people and property if you happen to be directly under it (word of advice here, not a good place to be). And once and for all let’s put the never striking twice concept to rest. In 2010 the perimeter fence next to the gated entry to Data Cave was struck not twice, but three time all within a few feet of each other! Talk about real world testing of our protection equipment. I became intrigued with this phenomenon of nature, and compiled some interesting information I would like to share with you.
Lightning is a phenomenal force of nature that can not only cause significant damage where it impacts, but can also transmit that power for some distance over TV cables, power lines, telephone lines, and plumbing. This can spread the damaging effect of a strike over a substantial distance, and poses a serious threat to electronic equipment and individuals. The following are fantastic but true facts about lightning.
Did you know…
- The Earth is struck by lightning 100 times per second (3.6 TRILLION per year)?
- The Earth is struck by lightning 1,800 times at any moment?
- The U.S. has approximately 100,000 thunderstorms PER YEAR?
- Lightning can reach temperatures of 50,000°F (5 times as hot as the Sun)?
- Lightning has been observed over 100 miles long?
- An average lightning flash has the energy of a 1-KILOTON EXPLOSION?
- Voltage in a cloud to ground lightning strike is 100 million to one billion volts?
- The average lightning strike is 6 miles long?
- In the U.S., lightning kills more than Hurricanes and Tornadoes, combined? Only floods kill more!
- There are more than 10,000 forest fires started by lightning each year?
- Lightning causes approximately $5 Billion of damage in the U.S. each year?
- FEMA estimates there are 200 deaths and 750 severe injuries from lightning each year in the U.S.?
Safety Tip
Lightning damage to electronics usually occurs when lightning strikes to nearby utility poles or wires, then enters the building through power, phone, and TV wires. For direct or indirect hits, the only sure way is to pull the power, phone, and cable plugs on sensitive electronics before thunderstorms threaten. Never touch wires during a thunderstorm, even to unplug your equipment. People have been electrocuted while unplugging their electronics during thunderstorms.
Data Cave is responsible for the protection of thousands of pieces of our clients’ equipment so you can believe we take lightning very seriously. I will be post future blogs on this topic including more on the basic science of lightning, types (yes there are different types, my favorite is out-of-the-blue lightning which strikes from a clear sky), strange lightning related events and lightning mitigation strategies.
If you have 9 minutes to spare, you might want to check out this great footage from NOVA which discusses the possible cosmic ray origin of lightning and includes some very cool video of induced lightning strikes!
Come see how Data Cave protects client’s equipment from lightning. Contact us at 866-514-2283.
Monitoring the Cave
February 14, 2012 by David Krider · Leave a Comment
At Data Cave, we have a lot of equipment in our building. From routers and switches to water chillers and pumps to electrical switchgear and diesel generators. There’s a lot of “stuff” happening, all the time. To help us keep tabs on all of this, we have setup several pieces of software.
Firstly, there’s Nagios. It monitors everything of significance in the building, and alerts us to any problems that may arise. At the time of this writing, it’s checking 240 services across 108 hosts. There are warnings if server room temps get out of range, checks to ensure surveillance cameras are online, notifications when there are changes in internet routing tables, just to name a few examples. Nagios is free and open software, and it’s become a sort of industry standard. Yes, there are shortcomings, which many alternatives try to address. However, it can handle any monitoring-and-alerting scenario you can imagine, and it never crashes. Just in case it does, though, we have an instance of monit watching it, and an automatically-synced failover Nagios instance, which has never engaged to date.
There are many expensive closed-source alternatives to Nagios. They will try to tell you that they are easier to configure. I haven’t found that to be the case. You still must learn how to configure things their way, and that’s just a different learning curve. At a previous place of employment, I was told I had to scrap a working Nagios setup and replace it with a proprietary package. It had taken me 4 weeks to fully configure my instance of Nagios. Even with the head start of knowing everything I wanted to monitor, it still took me 3 weeks (and several support calls) to get the proprietary solution working. To add insult to injury, there were a couple of checks I was making with Nagios that were simply impossible with the commercial package. Of course, your mileage may vary.
Secondly, there’s Cacti. Again, it’s become a bit of a standard, but, again, there are alternatives designed to address its weaknesses. While Nagios is a monitoring and alerting tool, Cacti graphs the data and reveals trends. It was designed for tracking networking bandwidth, but we’ve extended it to monitor power consumption as well. For graphing trends of less importance than bandwidth and power, we use pnp4nagios.
On top of Nagios and Cacti, we’ve created two Rails applications. The first is Haystack. It’s a dead-simple Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) polling application. Once a minute, it grabs all the SNMP data it can from each piece of equipment’s manufacturer’s SNMP counter tree, and simply stores it in a database. There’s a very simple interface for searching through and pulling out data of interest, but it’s primarily there in case something happens for which we need to review the data in detail.
ComHub Acknowledgements
The second custom package we’ve written is ComHub, which we’ve released as open-source software on GitHub. ComHub receives the messages from all of our systems, and then routes them to the appropriate people. Each person in ComHub can subscribe to various keywords, choose methods for receiving alerts, configure time windows for when to receive them, and setup filters for things they don’t care about. Rather than blindly sending SMS messages through the cellular carriers gateways via email, and hoping they arrive, the system uses Twilio to deliver text messages. With this service, we can not only get notification that the user’s cell phone actually received the alert, but also process responses to the alerts in the application. We use this primarily for acknowledging alerts in Nagios, or, optionally, putting the service or host into a planned downtime window.
ComHub Messages
Running hand-in-hand with Nagios and Cacti is SNMPTT. It receives any and all SNMP traps that might get sent out from any piece of equipment. It filters some useless informational alerts for us, and then routes the messages on through ComHub. It can be integrated with Nagios, but we found it easier to make ComHub the integration point.
In the coming months, I’ll talk more about how we integrate our smart door controller system into this setup.
Indiana Data Centers
February 8, 2012 by Kara Manon · Leave a Comment
There has been a lot of talk about Indiana lately. For example, Indianapolis just hosted its first Super Bowl, which is absolutely fantastic for a native Hoosier like myself (especially considering the Patriots lost). There was so much praise for our capital city that there might even be hope that we could host another Super Bowl in the future. The massively popular 800-foot zipline in Super Bowl Village is leaving other host cities wondering if they should follow suit. On another sports related note, the Pacers are doing surprisingly well this year. Let’s not forget that Bloomington, Indiana was named one of the 10 Best Cities for Data Centers. How great is that? Considering Data Cave is the closest Tier IV data center to Bloomington, that’s pretty exciting.
On top of everything else, the weather had been unseasonably warm. All-in-all, not a bad time to be living in Indiana.
So, why should you choose a data center in Columbus, Indiana?
First, the Midwest is a logical location for a data center. Land, power, and other associated costs of building or leasing a data center are lower than places like California, New York, New Jersey, etc. When leasing space from a Midwest data center like Data Cave, those savings get passed along to the customer. The Midwest is free of things like Hurricanes, Tsunamis and major earthquakes which is always a plus. Of course, we do have to worry about tornadoes which is why Data Cave was built to withstand 200+ mph winds (EF5 rating). I’m not kidding, if there’s a tornado coming, you can find me and my husband camped out at Data Cave. Typically, it isn’t the wind you have to worry about, it’s what the wind is carrying that can cause damage. Debris would have to go through 2 concrete walls (12″ and 8″ blocks) reinforced with one-inch rebar in order to get through to customer equipment. I’d also like to point out that there are also no windows around our customer suites. Seems logical, right? No one could bust a window to get in and debris can’t fly through easily. Okay, back to the tornado discussion. On this list of the 25 deadliest tornadoes in U.S. history, only one of them went through Indiana and that was in 1925. So, I would say that the chances of a EF4 or EF5 tornado in Indiana are slim. Actually, EF4 rated tornadoes and above account for 1% of all tornadoes and I’ve even seen that percentage as low as .1%.
I’ve shown some benefits of being in the Midwest but what about Columbus, Indiana? Columbus sits outside of Metropolitan areas. This means there is more “buffer acreage”, less people, no shared building space (i.e. strip mall) and it doesn’t affect your connectivity. All of this equates to higher security for your equipment. Data Cave sits on 21 acres on a private drive and gated entrance. You won’t find anyone randomly walking around our building at night or any other time for that matter. However, Data Cave is still within driving distance of Indianapolis, Louisville and Cincinnati. We have clients based in Bloomington, Indianapolis, Louisville, and more. One of our clients is even based in Seattle, Washington and another has locations all over the U.S. that need to be connected.
I’ve been working for Data Cave since September and I can tell you that it doesn’t take long to become impressed with the place. It’s a safe place for your equipment and we know what we’re doing. It also doesn’t take weeks to get things done around here. We have technicians, engineers, programmers who are so knowledgeable that it blows my mind. But seriously, don’t just listen to me, you should see it for yourself.
Call us at 866-514-2283 or fill out our little form and request more info.