The Importance of Data Center Environmental Assessment
Posted on Sat, Jan 09, 2010 @ 03:36 PM
Author: Perry Szarka
Modern data centers and computer rooms house critical business applications and data and therefore it is important to ensure that every reasonable effort is made to provide a resilient support infrastructure through proactive data center management.
Despite the use of high quality hardware and careful software configuration, problems can still occur if unseen infrastructure weaknesses exist. This is why comprehensive data assessments can be of a great benefit to many organizations.
The goal of a thorough data center assessment is to confirm that the data center environment is running smoothly, and providing a safe and secure home to your organization's most sensitive data and information.
There are of course wide-ranging differences between data centers and therefore assessments should be tailored to the particular data center being evaluated.
However there are several standard procedures for determining the overall quality of your data center:
- Inspection of the physical space and Thermal Assessment
As menial as it may sound, it's important to inspect center's physical environment including the floors, walls, ceilings and the space under a raised floor (if present). The intent here is to ensure that the space is suitable for the machinery it houses and that no obvious structural concerns exist.
A suboptimal environment may contain cooling or airflow problems and a detailed thermal assessment may be needed to test the airflow. This keeps the temperature at a moderate level, which in turn keeps your machines operating smoothly. If physical security is of concern, the physical assessment will help to determine any additional security needs.
- Inspections of power components
UPS systems, generators, power distribution units (PDUs), transformers, batteries and cabling should be inspected to ensure that a proper balance of power usage is maintained. Load ratings and other data measurements can help provide key metrics for this purpose. Without a proper balance, a power surge or shortage could damage expensive equipment, and stall data storage and backups.
- Equipment Census and Review
Servers, Storage Arrays, Network Equipment, Appliances, Tape Devices and any other IT equipment should be analyzed in specific cases, such as for organizations using a virtualized storage, solution or if server consolidation is being considered.
Ultimately, after assessing your environment, you will have all the information you need to accurately determine the stability and strength of your current data center, and identify any areas of weakness that require updates or improvements.
A complete data center asessment will help to ensure that your organization's data is regularly saved, housed in a location that gets the most out of your technology systems, and that sensitive and vital information remains safe and secure.
Perry Szarka is the Datacenter Strategic Business Unit leader at MCPc. He works closely with clients to understand their business objectives and discover solutions to help them achieve their goals.
Image courtesy of The Planet.