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Datacenter

In the Old Economy, brick-and-mortar companies fenced in their manufacturing plants and restricted access to certain areas of their plants for protecting their assets. In the New Economy, a similar need is felt by dot.com companies to protect their assets. The DataCenter satisfies this requirement.

Since the advent of the Internet, DataCenters have been the rage of both the media and e-business circles. In India, the industry finally seems to be looking up as industry analysis shows an expectation of investments in excess of Rs 500 crore being made in the next 18 months into the datacenter business.

According to industry sources India will have 20 data centre players by end-2001. There are already about 15 players. That's a huge figure, considering there were none at all even last year. So the time seems ripe for guiding the user community through the complex decision-process of choosing a data centre, which is increasingly becoming more complicated with the expanding number of domestic choices, service offerings, and pricing schemes, nicely wrapped in confusing jargon.

An Internet DataCenter (IDC) is a specialized facility that houses Web sites and provides data serving and other services for other companies. It may also contain a network operations centre (NOC). This is a restricted access area containing automated systems that constantly monitor server activity, Web traffic, and network . And help engineers spot potential problems before they happen.

Usually, data centres offer two kinds of services: co-location, and managed services. Co-location, a traditional service offered by most ISPs, is the provisioning of server space, power, network infrastructure and bandwidth to servers that you supply. Managed services, on the other hand, provide a defined standard configuration server for hosting, along with a defined standard operating system (OS), network management and network monitoring. For the former the entire administrative responsibility is yours. In the latter, the IDC manages the whole process. Excessively secure hosting infrastructure, a scalable network infrastructure, and value-added services and support-infrastructure back these services.

Choosing a datacenter can be simply complex. That's because you have several choices in India. The most important include infrastructure, pricing, SLA (system level agreement defining terms of service), management background, bandwidth, security, power supply, temperature control, fire detectors, network infrastructure, service and support, and data backup.

You need to properly understand your present and future requirements, talk to various IDCs, customize the hosting plan, and check the fine print before putting your dot.com child in a datacenter crèche.

Due to wider pricing options, most Indian Web sites are hosted in the US. According to industry estimates, hosting charges in India is some 30 percent higher. The US market is mature unlike its embryonic cousin in India with expensive bandwidth and imported hardware. Hopefully, changing Government policies will bring a rosier future.

To guarantee both physical security and round-the-clock reliability, access to datacenter facilities should be restricted, and monitored. Security guards must allow only members to access the facilities with swipe cards. The security system should also have closed-circuit televisions and a central control room. However, this only provides physical security to your investments. In order to have 100 percent uptime from your Net servers, it's necessary to protect them from power failures and a poor operating environment. This is extremely relevant for India, where power fluctuations, cuts, and a hot and sticky tropical climate are regular features of our operating environment. Diesel generators and UPS systems are a must. Ideally, they should jointly generate more power than what's necessary. Distributing power through at least two lines for protection against a single-point failure also helps future expansion. This captive power should also support the centre's air-conditioning. And since water spells electrical hell for computers, it's essential to locate the air-conditioning below the server racks.

Typically, the temperature inside the datacenter should be around 65 degrees Fahrenheit and humidity between 45 and 50 percent. Like other offices, a datacenter must have smoke/fire-detectors. And, datacenters must employ inert gases, like Halon or FM-200, to douse any accidental fire. The floor of the datacenter should be constructed in such a fashion that allows easy access to network cabling. And, in the case of networking infrastructure, the buzzword is 'redundant'.

The datacenter must have Internet connection from at least two ISPs, through two different routes: leased circuit and microwave link. The local network backbone and the backbone switch/router must also be in excess. If you require, datacenters can also provide caching devices, SSL encryption accelerators and load balancers, at an extra cost.

To protect all the customers, the datacenter must have a 'racking neighborhood', where the servers are housed in rack cages. A separate configuration area is also available for customers. As with other devices, sufficient room should be available for expansion on network switches, and the racking cages.

All this sounds quite impressive. But, what really counts is the service that's delivered by the datacenter personnel. Skilled technical staff, backed by a command centre is the mark of a competent datacenter. These networking specialists must be available 24x7, for attending to emergencies.

Further, the command centre must monitor and control each network device in the datacenter through remote-monitoring and management tools, like HP OpenView, or Computer Associates' Unicentre TNG, automated back-up facilities for all managed services, and, if possible, a help-desk. During core hours, the command centre should have provisions for incident and problem logging and first-level support with the technical support staff providing second and third-level support.

Ideally, a command centre provides direct feedback to the customer on basic server monitoring that include server availability, hard disk usage, CPU and memory usage, intrusion-detection, and backups. When reviewing your server's backup strategy, look for Storage Area Network (SAN) or Network Attached Storage (NAT) solutions. These provide more flexibility and scalability.

But, the above only describes a near-ideal datacenter. At the end of the day, what really protects or insures your dot.com assets is the SLA (Service Level Agreements). This ensures bad incidents from becoming worse, when things go wrong. It's the customer's prerogative to insist on a customized SLA, rather than a standard one. Ultimately, it's your asset that's at stake.

Amrita Ghosh
[email protected]

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