Yesterday Chris and I toured six datacenters around the Minneapolis / St. Paul area looking for space for expansion and was somewhat surprised what we found.
I have often heard the ramblings from vendors that if you have seen one datacenter you have seen them all.This is far from fact - it is true that many offer the same general concept in datacenter space (Power, IP and Space) but every organization has gone about this in a different ways.
We toured space from simple unmanaged co-lo space all the way to the managed everything space. the services range drastically so does the price as one may expect.
Although I am not going to go into detail describing the centers as much of the information behind closed doors is ether competitive knowledge or could be considered a security risk.I am going to comment on a few questions that continually came up and seemed like the most provident questions.
They are (to no surprise):
- Cooling
- Power
- Cross connects
- Security
- Policy
- Space
IIt seems that Minneapolis is a bit better off in the power arena then say Chicago, however we also are dealing with largely skewed numbers in bandwidth costs as well. As many of you know, we are running IBM Bladecenters within our environment and could not be happier- but it does bring up a few issues as we look for space.Many of the co-lo facilities are a bit skeptic on the idea of blades as it changes the design of their space and design that often has been in place for several years. The KVA requirements per rack have multiplied over the previous requirements just a few years ago and with more power consumption comes more cooling requirements.As you remember from class, the more power consumed equals more heat generated. (More on that later)
Only a few centers actually abided by what I would consider best practices for cooling and seemed to overlook even some of the most common configurations of hot and cold rows. Some disagreed on the usefulness of raised floors within the new environments (as I agree that your raised floor must be huge to force the necessary cooling) while others you could feel hot and cold spots as you walk from one rack to the next.
Cross connects are another area on interest as this identifies and helps build the network mesh. We looked at several locations that would allow us to provide our own networks and utilize dark fiber along with allowing for multiple peering configurations. This issue didnt seem to be that large of a concern as everyone seemed to be open to options and after all is a little more typical in a datacenter co-lo facility.
Security is a concern for us as it is with anyone, this I am not going to even touch on as every company has its own requirements and every solution has something a little different to offer. I will say that almost every center that we visited was or was working towards the SAS 70 policy roll out.
Policy seems to be where everyone differs and rightfully so.Infrastructure can only go so far, I will agree with a portion of the above sentence describing that if you have seen one you have seen them all.Its true that looking at the same CRAC and UPS system get a little old but the truth is in the policy. Policy govern how often the genset is tested- if it is load banked, full failover testing, how the transfer switches are working and so on. Its simply not enough to just tell us that you have a genet and UPS systems I want to know how its tested, when its tested and who tests it.The same goes true with core router upgrades and emergency response systems. Will we be alerted if we failover on power from one UPS to the others?Will I know if the humidity is off or if heat becomes an issue?I cannot stress this enough, If you plan on lighting up another center and trust your business and continuity to another company you better understand if they follow the same policy as you and spell out what your after prior to finding out the hard way.
The last thing is space to grow, simply looking at a rack and saying we can get 6 bladecenters in place is not going to work. No way will you be placing six or even three bladecenters into a rack at a co-lo and expect to walk away from it feeling good.At the same time we need to make sure that we have the room to expand as needed and if we are locked up in a cage with companies all the way around us it potentially forces us to add space to other islands within the facility. Although this can be done, you are now pushing fiber for storage and data over unprotected areas that may become a concern as you go.You may also be running into different cooling and power issues as others are blowing hot air on your equipment.
The thing to walk away with is to understand every aspect of the center as if it was your own.Remember that its managed by essentially the same staff at your organization all following policy and best practices. You can have 8 power units but if no one tests the equipment its worthless, you can have awesome new CRAC units but if you configure them in the wrong way its useless. You can have the best security practices but if you dont follow them its pointless and so on.Understand that place as if it where your own and buy space on what you feel your business can strive in, in my opinion its more about the policy and people than the white-room type atmosphere.People can still do stupid things no matter what environment its in and policy will be the only thing dictating what stupid things they can and cant do.
I will comment more on power as we continue this process, but I was absolutely amazed that in some locations little consideration was given to support blades, storage or even 220/208v in general.
[tags] Data Centers, Cooling, Bladecenter, IBM, HS20, HS40, Co-lo, Colocation, Hosted, SAN, Outsourced, Policy, Security [/tags]
Although I like the idea in Windows to add a picture to your profile, I can never seem to come up with a picture that I would like to use or an image that seems to work for me. I got to thinking that with the recent mii craze and the fact that my mii I use on my home wii looks close to me and I could use that. Hey, its better than a robot or a fish!
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