Goldilocks and the Data Center: Which Location is Just Right?
April 9, 2013 by Brittany Lutke · Leave a Comment
Congratulations! You’ve been given the task of researching and finding a data center for your company’s IT equipment. Where do you even start?
Many of the people I talk to feel like Goldilocks. Don’t remember the story? Goldilocks breaks into the Bears’ house and tries different beds, chairs, and porridge. Two of the three were too… something. Hard or soft. Big or small. Hot or cold. She struggled until she found the bed (or chair or porridge) that was just right.
Location makes many IT decision makers feel like Goldilocks. This data center is too close, and my equipment is at risk. This data center is too far, and it will be tough to maintain my equipment. What is the location that is just right?
When making a location decision, ask yourself the following questions. Your answers will help you select an appropriate location and to determine your distance threshold.
- Will the equipment in the data center be focused on production or disaster recovery?
- Does your equipment require heavy management?
If your equipment is for disaster recovery, choose a data center at least 50 miles from your production site. I talk to many CIOs, network administrators, and IT professionals who struggle with this. It’s tough to imagine your babies (your equipment) so far from you and your attentive care, but I urge you not to be what some call a “server hugger.” If you need disaster recovery, it’s best to have geographic redundancy. By nature, disaster recovery is intended to protect you should your first set of equipment were to meet with unforeseen circumstances. If your data center is too close, your equipment will be at risk, and you’ll have defeated the purpose of having a disaster recovery site.
If your equipment is for production, choose a data center that is accessible for regular maintenance and meets your quality standards. For production servers, location is a less important criteria. It is more important to focus on choosing the highest quality data center that meets your needs.
If your equipment requires heavy management, you may believe that a close location is just right. But with options like remote hands and managed service providers, companies can reap the benefits of geographic redundancy for their high maintenance equipment. Using additional support for server maintenance allows your organization flexibility and the option to focus on other high priority items.
Selecting a data center location is not an easy task. Hopefully, after asking yourself these questions, you’ll have selected the geographic location that is just right for your data center.
Still looking for more guidance on how to choose a data center? Check out the following resources, or feel free to contact me at brittany@thedatacave.com.
- 10 Things to Consider When Choosing a Data Center
- 7 Critical Things to Look for When Touring a Data Center
- Top 10 Tips for Disaster Recovery
- Why Columbus, Indiana is a Great Data Center Location
10 Things to Consider When Choosing a Data Center
December 13, 2012 by Kara Manon · Leave a Comment
So, you’ve chosen to outsource your data center. Now what?
It’s time to get priorities in order and decide what is most important when choosing a data center. Here are a few things you might consider.
1. Power
Having redundancy in place when it comes to power is critical – redundant utility lines, generators, UPS flywheels or batteries to ensure that when the power goes out (and it will), your equipment won’t go down. Power outages have horrifying effects on servers, and you won’t have the time to rebuild your IT infrastructure, not to mention the risk of downtime to your end clients.
2. Connectivity
This is a crucial component of your data center selection, but most data centers will have access to a large variety of carriers. The pertinent issues deal with the cost of reaching your chosen ISP. Redundancy in this area is also important. Fiber gets cut and carriers go down. What can go wrong, will go wrong. So having redundancy in place to mitigate that risk is very important. Utilizing “blended” bandwidth ensures that when one carrier goes down, you’ll have automatic failover to another.
We’ve given you a sample of things to consider when choosing a data center. To read further on what matters most when making your selection, download our whitepaper on 10 Things to Consider When Choosing a Data Center.
Don’t forget to contact us with any questions or to schedule a tour of our robust and redundant data center at 866-514-2283 or e-mail info@thedatacave.com.
100% Uptime
October 18, 2011 by Kara Manon · Leave a Comment
There’s something you might not know about Data Cave. Everything we distribute, from handouts to our website, says that we provide 99.999% uptime. However, that simply isn’t true. In reality, we can boast 100% uptime. This means that our facility has weathered storms and power outages with NO downtime. We began with our first client in early 2010 which amounts to nearly two years of uninterrupted power for our clients.
How are we able to maintain 100% uptime?
Tape backups go bye-bye
February 7, 2011 by Caleb Tennis · Leave a Comment
Our friends at Data Center Knowledge have a great article about how hard drives are replacing tapes for backup purposes.
This is something we’ve seen, and experienced now for a while. The overall cost of a hard drive based system is on par with, if not cheaper, than a comparable tape system. But factor in “other” costs and it really puts the hard drive system over the edge.
First, one cannot underestimate the human cost. Someone has to rotate the tapes, and replace bad ones in the deck over time. This requires a person to constantly monitor the system, something which over time usually languishes.
Second, it’s hard to know if the tape has gone bad until you need it. While modern tape decks will issue error reports, it’s not always obvious that data was not on a tape until you go to restore from it – and it doesn’t work. And obviously, that’s the time it’s needed most.
Third, you simply never know when a vendor is going to stop supporting your tape hardware – something happening more and more often. With a SAN based system, it’s easier to migrate data between vendors over time. And hard drives are much faster at data transfer than tape based systems.
As the article points out, it’s sometimes even cheaper to buy a direct Gig-E link between your primary facility and your off-site data center and do a backup over-the-wire than use a tape system and rotate tapes offsite manually.
Interested in this approach? We’ve implemented it for multiple customers, and can help implement it for you as well – saving you money each month on your current tape based system. Contact us to learn more.
Redundancy and Uptime
January 5, 2010 by Caleb Tennis · Leave a Comment
Is your data center maximally redundant?
Generator Load Test – Video
November 6, 2009 by admin · Leave a Comment
Two weeks ago, we load tested the generator. Here is video of that load test.
Generator Load Test
October 23, 2009 by admin · Leave a Comment
Earlier this afternoon, we fired up the generator to do a load test.
Stay tuned for video of the test.
More on the UPSs
October 2, 2009 by admin · Leave a Comment
The UPS manufacturer was onsite this week to bring the additional UPS capacity online.
Additional UPS Capacity
September 15, 2009 by admin · 2 Comments
A few weeks ago, we ordered additional flywheels for our UPS systems.
Internet Connectivity
August 5, 2009 by admin · Leave a Comment
Last week, Data Cave’s internet connectivity was brought online.
Currently, we have internet connectivity from two separate providers. Both connections are on fiber optic lines. The fiber enters the building in two different locations, from two geographically dispersed areas. Each connection goes a separate direction – currently, one enters the city of Columbus and the other goes to the city Shelbyville.