How to select a data center

Pervez Delawalla, President and CEO, Net2EZ
Pervez Delawalla, President and CEO, Net2EZ

Installing the redundancy measures necessary to make sure company data is available 24/7, regardless of calamity, is prohibitively expensive and requires a great deal of know-how, which is why many organizations outsource their data protection to companies that are specialized to guard it.
“We live in an age where data has a critical role in our lives on a daily basis. Losing access to that data, whether from being knocked offline or because of a catastrophe, can be terminally disruptive, so having backup systems in place is critical,” says Pervez Delawalla, president and CEO of Net2EZ.
Specialized data centers are dedicated buildings constructed to house server equipment that hold data — business or personal, critical or otherwise. They are designed for redundancy in physical functions, such as power and cooling, as well as network redundancy to keep data available to its customers. But what separates one from another?
Smart Business spoke with Delawalla about how to grade data centers to ensure you find one that offers the best protection for your most valuable commodity, your data.
What are the differences between data centers?
The biggest misconception is that all data centers are built the same, which leads many to ask the question, ‘Why would I pay more for one when I could get it cheaper down the street?’ The answer lies partly in Tier rating.
What is Tier rating?
Tiers represent the availability of your data based on the probabilities of system failures in a given year. Tier 1 guarantees 99.67 percent data availability in a year. Tier 4 is 99.995 percent availability. These percentages are based on the life expectancy of equipment such as power and cooling systems and distribution panels.
So that 99.67 percent represented by Tier 1 equates to, in any given year, 29 hours that systems could be offline and data inaccessible. While that might not sound like much, if you’re doing the volume of online business Amazon does, you can’t afford that. In instances where customers are trying to get to your site nearly every minute of the day, it needs to be up all the time to accommodate them, so you need the maximum level of redundancy for protection.
Tier 4 data centers, on the other hand, guarantee a maximum of 2.4 minutes offline in any given year. The percentage differences, measured in tenths, may seem negligible, but it accounts for a big difference when your data is affected.
How reliable is a Tier rating?
Data centers can have their Tier rating certified by a third party. Certification bodies include the Uptime Institute, as well as more traditional auditing firms such as Deloitte and Ernst & Young, which have technology arms capable of making an assessment. There’s also SSAE 16 certification for service organizations, which is used for reporting on controls.
How can companies ensure they have the highest level of data protection?
There are different methods for achieving redundancy. For instance, you could employ multiple Tier 1 data centers that fail over to each other. But that can be expensive. It might make more sense to use two Tier 4 data centers, one of which can serve as a geographic redundancy — it should be located a great distance from your main office and your primary data center to guard against failure caused from natural disasters, such as earthquakes.
What else should companies ask?
Make sure you’re aware of a data center’s redundancy for its network — the physical fiber that comes through the building — and how it interconnects with the rest of the network and Internet exchange points.
Also consider the support environment. Not all centers have 24/7 on-site engineering support to take care of the back of the house, such as the generators. While customers often overlook it, it’s critically important to have someone physically monitoring those systems and on hand to react to any major outages or prolonged system failures. Similarly, it’s great to have engineering and technical support on the server and router side of it to work directly with customers.
Pervez Delawalla is president and CEO at Net2EZ. Reach him at (310) 426-6700 or [email protected].
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