Think before you choose – Data Center site
- December 17, 2009
- by
- Pravin
Throughout the world enterprises including small city based to large MNC giants are benefited from the idea of centralized Data Center. Not only by productivity expand, but they also save a lot of money by using centralized data centers. Typically centralized data centers house high critical applications which should be available 24×7. Demands for data center is growing day by day. So design of a data center should be focused on flexibility, high availability and scalability. A data center which house all the applications of some enterprises, if somehow is hit by a disaster can have ill effects on those enterprises. Now to save their precious data companies which register with many data centers thus distributing their work. Before signing with a data center it is important to conclude why they need a data center. In 21st century technology permits business to be productive and to react swiftly to convert environment changes. Since data center save that technology they can be described as one of the most priced business asset.
If the data center fails or becomes unavailable, direct or indirect considerable loss can happen. Direct loss can cause in loss of revenue and some extra cost to you. Indirect losses are hard to calculate and can include regulatory and contractual compulsions, customer service, and legal issues, and they will also affect your reputation. Organizations like financial institutions, hospitals, credit cards, etc., are moving towards always available data centers because their productivity depends on the network. So, to choose a property and set up an efficient and effective data center that can work seamlessly 24×7, you can consult a professional similar to Walt Coulston. A real estate agent with expertise in sustainable data center design can be valuable to build a systematized data center.
According to various surveys conducted the loss in case of data center failures or any other problems is huge, and it can paralyze your business completely. In the case of a credit card company can lose at the rate of US $3 million per hour. If an ATM system goes offline company loss will be US $ 15,000 per hour. The worst will be in a case of brokerage company loss will be a whooping US $ 7 million per hour. On average loss of one-hour downtime for a large corporation is around US 1 $ million.
Before choosing a site for Data Center, there are few points to be cared of which are given below:
- Physical Location Threats – loading docks and parking areas should be kept away from perimeter walls, no threats of multi-tenant occupancy.
- Terrorism – closeness to high exposure targets should be avoided.
- Natural Disaster threats – areas prone to natural disasters like flood hazard areas, earthquakes, waterways, e.t.c.
- Easily Accessible site – site should be away from high traffic arteries and other transport zones like airport.
If all the above points are followed, you can save a lot of time, investment and cost of the clients which otherwise would have been wasted in search for site. Main motive of a data center should be providing accessibility to data center anywhere anytime. Once the clients are assured of data security they can use another data center for disaster recovery. Second data center will not only overcome single point of failure but also it provide some additional benefits like high scalability, load distribution, and application scalability.