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Colocation Data Center
Thinking from the customer's perspective
Colocation data centers must be designed with a clear philosophy in mind - where reliability, efficiency, consistency and continuity play a key role. They have a mission to fulfill: To provide continuity and world-class data center service around the clock to ensure hardware housing and continuous uptime.
The best way to achieve this is to review all planning, decisions and security concepts from the customer's perspective.
MEET EXPECTATIONS
Short communication channels, flexibility, speed and the willingness and ability to do whatever is necessary shows that every customer - whether multinational company or small, locally specialized IT firms - has made the right decision with Colocation.
Before deciding on a colocation deployment, many clients ask themselves the following questions:
- Can the colocation site cope with the current power density of the racks with a single power distributor to the rack?
- What about future requirements?
- Can the colocation provider provide sufficient cooling for the desired rack power density and temperature specifications, both now and in the foreseeable future?
- What is the colocation provider's remote service solution - can the hardware be rebooted by a third party depending on the requirements?
- Is frequent access to the racks in the colocation facility required, whether for IT configuration changes or repairs? If so, by whom? Would a rack-level asset management system be useful?
- Does the colocation provider offer DCIM-as-a-Service?
- If not, would a dedicated DCIM deployment help?
- What needs to be considered in terms of IT asset security, both physical and logical?
- How is actual energy consumption measured?
Power Distribution
Electricity is one of the highest recurring costs when operating a colocation system. A PDU (Power Distribution Unit) is literally central to the design of an intelligent rack. With a smart PDU selection, the number of power distribution units from the colocation provider to the IT infrastructure can be minimized. This gives you the highest level of security, a grid and double bottom approach, and allows you to efficiently use the electricity you pay for each month.
When determining power, it's all about the right form factor, the right number of outlets and the right features for your application. You should also consider whether you need 1 kW or more than 100 kW in the PDU (DC or AC).
Selecting a PDU suitable for the chosen colocation environment is critical to achieving operational availability and efficiency goals, and to being able to record and document these goals for calculation and documentation purposes.
With remote measurement and control of power output, intelligent PDUs allow convenient remote restart via an integrated web interface or SNMP, giving customers access to their system-critical applications at all times.
- Power consumption verification and/or energy reporting
- Monitoring of the power supply at rack level
- Output power monitoring
- Rack access control
- Rack access monitoring via IP camera
- Asset Tracking
- Environmental monitoring - temperature, humidity, air pressure difference, water detector at ground level
- Dry contact measurement
- Remote power management and/or device restart
- Intelligent load shedding
- Capacity planning
Always knowing what is happening anywhere - and documenting it
When IT equipment is located externally at a colocation site, monitoring the temperature and humidity in the operating environment of the IT hardware is an indispensable way to guarantee and document the maximum performance, efficiency and availability of the equipment operated in the data center.
The importance of accurate monitoring of environmental measurements cannot be overstated. Logging and trending of the environmental data allows conclusions to be drawn as to whether the data center's HVAC systems are functioning properly and whether the air circulation is sufficient for the IT loads.
In addition, potentially overloaded systems/racks are identified. Intelligent PDUs from Server Technology and Raritan provide an unprecedented level of integrated functionality for environmental sensors. Located on and in the IT rack, they are visible through the PDU network interface and provide a detailed view inside the data center. When measuring temperature, humidity, air pressure differential, floor humidity and dry contact closure.
Guarantee physical security
Certain PDUs support rack door access control to ensure that third parties, such as remote workers trying to access your IT cage in the colocation facility, can only access the rack assets that you have remotely shared. All activities at the rack are logged, making it easier to review access history and ensure compliance with regulations.
Tracking and managing a remote colocation data center with constant asset movement can be difficult for IT teams. Knowing where loads are located in the data center can help simplify not only your capacity planning, but also that of your customers - ensuring that the full potential of each asset is realized. By using an asset management system, the location of all rack-mounted equipment in the data center can be determined individually.
The most common challenges in implementing a Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software tool are the effort required to register assets in the tool and to maintain the DCIM database as systems are added, removed and moved within the data center. Combining an Asset Management System (AMTs + AMSs) with a supported DCIM tool greatly simplifies DCIM maintenance when the data center is operated and changed over time.
