Commissioning a high-availability data centre to international standards is a complex undertaking. And if the company doing the commissioning is Business Connexion, it is also an endeavour that involves scouring the world for the best practices, the latest in technology and techniques to put together a facility that is truly world-class in every way.
As South Africa`s leading provider of outsourced or managed IT services, Business Connexion builds capacity to handle the current and future needs of its clients. The company has announced that a new data facility is being established in Midrand, between the strategically important business centres of Johannesburg and Pretoria.
Truly leaving no stone unturned in its efforts to create a highly resilient and redundant repository for the critical information that drives business today, Nick Bartels, Business Connexion`s data centre design and construction team leader, explains that guidelines from the Uptime Institute were just the beginning.
"The Uptime Institute focuses on creating and operating knowledge communities for improving uptime management in data centre facilities. Its members are drawn from Fortune 500 companies who collectively and interactively learn from one another and Institute-sponsored meetings, tours, benchmarking, best practices, uptime metrics, and abnormal incident data collection and analysis," he says.
Bartels explains that the Uptime Institute`s highest rating for a data centre is Tier IV, which is composed of multiple active power and cooling distribution paths, has redundant components, and is fault tolerant, to provide 99.995% availability. However, this was not enough for Business Connexion.
"The reality is that there are different ways to interpret the guidelines provided by the institute. For example, the thickness of the walls of the facility are not specified - but what does that thickness mean unless the material from which the wall is constructed is specified? So, Business Connexion assessed its requirements using the institute`s recommendations as a starting point and opted to build the walls to the specifications of a bank vault," he explains.
Research into best practices from a multiplicity of further sources was also undertaken, including the likes of Gartner, the South African Bureau of Standards, the British Standards Institute, international conferences focusing on data centre optimisation, and the International Standards Organisation (ISO).
Bartels goes on to explain that the real technology in ensuring a highly reliable data centre is not necessarily in the computer systems it houses, but rather in the construction of the building itself. As such, everything that supplies the data centre will be duplicated - electrical power, cooling systems (critical for high-power computers, which produce a significant amount of heat), uninterruptible power systems and diesel generators. Every system and subsystem supplying resources will be duplicated to ensure that if anything happens to the one, the other is on standby. Even the fuel that will power the generators will be carefully managed to ensure that if electrical power is interrupted, the facilities can run for a minimum of 72 hours before refuelling is necessary.
That takes care of the data centre as a self-contained unit. But what if something happens inside the data centre that interrupts its functioning?
Another identical data centre will be established within the same office park, but in the furthest corner from the facility. Connected by `dark fibre` (ultra-high-speed fibre optic cables - which have two independent routes around each side of the office park), the second site is identical in every respect. Everything that happens on the computers at the first site can be instantly duplicated on the other; so even if the earth opened up and swallowed one data centre, the other would continue running as if nothing had happened.
"The measures taken to protect the information in the data centre are extreme - this reflects the importance of information to modern businesses," says Bartels. He adds that in this country, only financial services organisations (like banks) have such extreme measures in place. With the commissioning of its new facility, Business Connexion is able to offer the same level of high availability to its outsource clients at a significantly reduced cost owing to economies of scale.
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