EDITOR’S QUESTION
BRIAN SMITH, BUSINESS
UNIT MANAGER: MANAGED
DATACENTRE AND CLOUD
SOLUTIONS, DATACENTRIX
Q + A + Q + A + Q + A + Q + A + Q + A + Q + A + Q + A +
Data centre resilience is being tested
like never before, particularly within
the South African context where
technology is under immense pressure to
deliver remote working availability due to
COVID-19 restrictions, while concurrently
being faced with renewed power
interruptions in the form of the latest bout of
load-shedding.
A data centre’s resilience can be defined as
the measurement of its ability to continue to
operate despite the failure of a component,
such as its related equipment or power
grid connection, or any other disruption.
Resilience could be described as a data
centre’s vulnerability to failure.
Data centre resilience can be
considered from four aspects, namely
telecommunications (the network),
electrical (power), structural (the physical
building or room housing the data centre),
and mechanical (cooling). As prescribed by
The Uptime Institute, there are standard
data centre resilience measurements,
known as tier ratings. There are four tiers
of data centre resilience, from lowest to
highest: N, N+1, 2N and 2N+1.
Continuous resilience improvement is a
must today, with connectivity being many
a business’ life-support system. Local C-level
executives therefore have to scrutinise their
specific business requirements when it comes
to its advancement. They must address
questions such as: how much downtime
is acceptable; how much budget can go
towards improving resilience – which would
need to take infrastructure, maintenance
costs and more into consideration; does
the cooling system work, even if there is no
power; is it possible to generate power within
the data centre; and whether or not the
correct technical skills are in place. Once these
“
CONTINUOUS
RESILIENCE
IMPROVEMENT
IS A MUST
TODAY, WITH
CONNECTIVITY
BEING MANY
A BUSINESS’
LIFE-SUPPORT
SYSTEM.
questions have been answered, a business’
uptime needs become clearer.
Next is whether it makes more sense to host
the data centre internally, or outsource it to
an expert.
To improve resilience towards reaching
the five or six nines of availability can be
an expensive exercise within an existing,
in-house data centre, to the tune of millions
of Rands, only recoverable over the following
seven to 10 years. It would require the right
equipment, the right staff and the right
maintenance contracts in place. Location
of the data centre is also critical, with
access to more power if needed, as well as
a seamless connection to more than one
telecom provider. Essentially, as availability
is increased, so too is the cost ratio for each
percentage point gained.
The benefits of outsourcing data centre
requirements mean that the services
partner will handle power and connectivity
requirements, ensure that the right
equipment is in place, and have the right
staff and technical expertise on board – with
uptime service level agreements (SLAs) in
place. This will not only ease remote working
requirements, it also allows businesses to
step away from budgeting towards an OPEX
focused model.
One of the major advantages of a hosted
environment is the economies of scale;
there is a fixed investment spread over a
larger group of companies all accessing
the service, and ultimately making a high
availability, higher tiered environment more
accessible to many organisations from a
cost point of view.
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