Google: Our PUE is Lower, and It's Scrupulous » Data Center Knowledge

via datacenterknowledge.com

Google: Our PUE is Lower, and It's Scrupulous » Data Center Knowledge

Google: Our PUE is Lower, and It's Scrupulous » Data Center Knowledge

Modern data center borrows medieval security tactics | ITworld

March 26, 2012, 3:45 PM — Its location cannot be disclosed (it is somewhere on the eastern seaboard), has a drainage pond that acts as a moat, and it has seven 20,000-square-foot areas (or pods), all connected.

It is Visa’s data center, featured in this article on USA Today. A good read, for sure.

Fast Company wrote about the data center – known as OCE, or Operations Center East – last year. That article is equally interesting, and equally a good read.

Visits to the data center are reportedly rare. Visa, after all, has to keep safe a gazillion credit card transactions. Security there is impressive, redundancy is too. There’s plenty of high-tech protection, but there’s some old-fashioned security too that harkens back to the middle ages.

There’s lots of interesting features about this data center, which Visa officially opened in 2009. When Visa opened it, the company said the new data center was becoming its second North American facility, giving it two synchronized centers that are each capable of supporting Visa's entire global payments volume in the event of a natural disaster or systems outage. There is instant fail-over technology between all four of Visa’s data centers on three continents. The data center can process hundreds of millions of transactions each day – and more than 10,000 transaction messages per second. It has more than 140,000 square feet of raised floor space.

But back to the moat, which is detailed in both aforementioned articles. Apparently, the moat is there to catch vehicles that might speed up the road leading to the OCE and can break through the hydraulic guards that can quickly be raised when unauthorized vehicles need to be stopped. The guards can stop a car going up to 50 miles per hour. If a car does break through, there’s a razor-sharp turn that can’t be navigated by that car, and the driver will most likely end up into the moat (posing as the drainage pond). Okay, so the drainage pond is no San Francisco Bay, which as we all know served as Alcatraz’ moat. But the OCE’s drainage pond and unwieldy road is still pretty impressive.

There are other security features that are pretty impressive, according to the articles. The facility is built to withstand earthquakes and hurricane force winds up to 170 mph (that means it can hold its own against a Cat 5). If there was an outage, there are two diesel generators totaling 4 megawatts of power that can keep the center running for nine days. Each of the pods have two rooms with 1,000 heavy-duty batteries each.

Getting in requires clearance from a guard station and a mobile security guy apparently riding around in a golf cart (according to the USA Today article). It also requires a photo, and fingerprints. The photos and fingerprints are necessary so the visitor can move through a security portal that requires a badge and biometric image of his or her fingerprint.

The Fast Company article reports that the OCE was built to meet the Uptime Institute’s standard of a Tier 4 center, the highest ranking of the institute’s classification system for evaluating data center infrastructure in terms of a business’ requirements for system availability.

via itworld.com

Modern data center borrows medieval security tactics | ITworld

Modern data center borrows medieval security tactics | ITworld

VCE and VMware: Virtualizing Your Infrastructure Just Got Easier datacenter dcim http://bit.ly/GNCAUe

Uptime Institute 7th Symposium, Featuring Digital Infrastructure Convergence and a Modular DataCenter Campus http://bit.ly/GG69pg DCIM

How data center managers can be prepared for the 10 most common surprises

1. Those high-density predictions finally are coming true: After rapid growth early in the century, projections of double-digit rack densities have been slow to come to fruition. Average densities hovered between 6.0 and 7.4 kW per rack from 2006 to 2009, but the most recent Data Center Users’ Group (DCUG) survey predicted average rack densities will reach 12.0 kW within three years. That puts a premium on adequate UPS capacity and power distribution as well as cooling to handle the corresponding heat output. 2. Data center managers will replace servers three times before they replace UPS or cooling systems: Server refreshes happen approximately every three years. Cooling and UPS systems are expected to last much longer—sometimes decades. That means the infrastructure organizations invest in today must be able to support—or, more accurately, scale to support—servers that may be two, three or even four generations removed from today’s models. What does that mean for today’s data center manager? It makes it imperative that today’s infrastructure technologies have the ability to scale to support future needs. Modular solutions can scale to meet both short- and long-term requirements. 3. Downtime is expensive: Everyone understands downtime is bad, but the actual costs associated with an unplanned outage are stunning. According to a Ponemon Institute study, an outage can cost an organization an average of about $5,000 per minute. That’s $300,000 in just an hour. The same study indicates the most common causes of downtime are UPS battery failure and exceeding UPS capacity. Avoid those problems by investing in the right UPS—adequately sized to support the load—and proactively monitoring and maintaining batteries. 4. Water and the data center do not mix – but we keep trying: The first part of this probably isn’t a surprise. Sensitive IT equipment does not respond well to water. However, the aforementioned Ponemon study indicates 35 percent of all unplanned outages are a result of some type of water incursion. These aren’t just leaky valves; in fact, many water-related outages are the result of a spilled coffee or diet soda. The fix: Check those valves, but more importantly, check the drinks at the door. 5. New servers use more power than old servers: Sever consolidation and virtualization can shrink server inventory by huge numbers, but that doesn’t exactly equate to huge energy savings. New virtualized servers, especially powerful blade servers, can consume four or five times as much energy as those from the preceding generation (although they usually do it more efficiently). The relatively modest savings at the end of that consolidation project may come as a surprise. There is no fix for this, but prepare for it by making sure the infrastructure is adequate to support the power and cooling needs of these new servers. 6. Monitoring is a mess: IT managers have more visibility into their data centers than ever before, but accessing and making sense of the data that comes with that visibility can be a daunting task. According to a survey of data center professionals, data center managers use, on average, at least four different software platforms to manage their physical infrastructure. Forty-one percent of those surveyed say they produce three or more reports for their supervisors every month, and 34 percent say it takes three hours or more to prepare those reports. The solution? Move toward a single monitoring and management platform. Today’s DCIM solutions can consolidate that information and proactively manage the infrastructure to improve energy and operational efficiency and even availability. 7. The IT guy is in charge of the building’s HVAC system: The gap between IT and Facilities is shrinking, and the lion’s share of the responsibility for both pieces is falling on the IT professionals. Traditionally, IT and data center managers have had to work through Facilities when they need more power or cooling to support increasing IT needs. That process is being streamlined, thanks in large part to those aforementioned DCIM solutions that increase visibility and control over all aspects of a building’s infrastructure. Forward-thinking data center managers are developing a DCIM strategy to help them understand this expansion of their roles and responsibilities. 8. That patchwork data center needs to be a quilt: In the past, data center managers freely mixed and matched components from various vendors because those systems worked together only tangentially. That is changing. The advent of increasingly intelligent, dynamic infrastructure technologies and monitoring and management systems has increased the amount of actionable data across the data center, delivering real-time modeling capabilities that enable significant operational efficiencies. IT and infrastructure systems still can work independently, but to truly leverage the full extent of their capabilities, integration is imperative. 9. Data center on demand is a reality: The days of lengthy design, order and deployment delays are over. Today there are modular, integrated, rapidly deployable data center solutions for any space. Integrated, virtually plug-and-play solutions that include rack, server and power and cooling can be installed easily in a closet or conference room. On the larger end, containerized data centers can be used to quickly establish a network or to add capacity to an existing data center. The solution to most problems is a phone call away. 10. IT loads vary – a lot: Many industries see extreme peaks and valleys in their network usage. Financial institutions, for example, may see heavy use during traditional business hours and virtually nothing overnight. Holiday shopping and tax seasons also can create unusual spikes in IT activity. Businesses depending on their IT systems during these times need to have the capacity to handle those peaks, but often can operate inefficiently during the valleys. A scalable infrastructure with intelligent controls can adjust to those highs and lows to ensure efficient operation. http://www.datacenterworld.com/preparing-for-10-common-data-center-surprise