Category Archives: Data Center

Reducing Data Center Damage Due to Earthquakes

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Whether your data center is located in a high risk seismic activity area or not, earthquake damage can be devastating to an unprotected facility.  Somewhere in the world, earthquakes are always happening. Magnitude 2 or smaller earthquakes are taking place several hundred times a day across the globe.  According to the USGS , it is estimated that there are 500,000 detectable earthquakes in the world each year. 100,000 of those can be felt, and 100 of them cause damage with possibly more damage done by a resulting fire than by the earthquake itself.  Taking into account seismic activity should be a part of your organization’s business continuity and disaster recovery planning in the event of an earthquake. 

Edge Mission Critical Systems specializes in providing you with the best in class modular systems that form the backbone of data centers and critical backup infrastructure. We incorporate various proprietary processes to ensure our structures will endure the most vicious environmental conditions, anywhere in the world, without compromising structural integrity.  Our turnkey modular data solution product, Binary Bunker, is Seismic rated – Zone 4, UL752 Ballistic Rated (Level 8), 200+ MPH wind rating, Fire resistant – 2+ hour, Floor loading -250 lbs/sq. ft., Roof loading – 100 lbs/sq. ft. and Thermal – 0.08 Btu/F or less.   Contact us today for more information in mitigating data center damage from earthquakes or other natural disasters.

Strategies for Avoiding IT Burnout in a World of Continuous Delivery

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Our always connected world of today is overloading IT operations teams and putting them at danger for burnout. Tech engineers and developers take a heavy personal toll from constantly fighting fires and dealing with application casualties to the point where alert fatigue sets in and best practices within the organization can be overlooked.   In order to keep critical systems up and running at all times, on-call IT support staff are especially vulnerable to the stress of late night wake up calls to deal with temperamental infrastructure, false alarms or poorly designed applications.  However, strategies can be put into place for improving conditions to lower the risk of employee burnout while also achieving better business results.

Implementing a robust suite of monitoring tools is a good place to start.  However, narrowly focused tools will only provide partial answers when it comes to addressing complex problems.  Upper management needs to be aware of the people cost associated with a support team’s stressful on-call rotation schedule.  The high cost of turnover is real, not to mention the business impact on revenue, profits and customer satisfaction. For a closer look at actionable steps that can be put into place for better work life balance for on-call IT employees, read full article here.

 

 

Saving Money Through Data Center Optimization Techniques

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When it comes to today’s data center environment, the word on everyone’s mind is MORE and oh by the way there is not going to be a budget increase in order to satisfy the more demands that are continually being put on the data center.  Meeting the demands of more compute capacity, more storage, more power, etc. is going to be challenging for data center managers without data center budget increases or at the hands of having to maintain a stable budget.  Data Center optimization techniques and efficiency best practices will become more critical without more funding to support the increase in demand data center functions and the savings will have to come from somewhere.

Areas to look at for optimization at the policy and procedure level include evaluating outside contractual arrangements to ensure efficiency for maintaining service level agreements.  Additionally at the hardware level, unused servers could be identified and decommissioned in an effort to right size environments while evaluating risk of running out of capacity. Data deduplication can free up storage space and installing infrastructure monitoring systems along with predictive analytics for problem resolution can go a long way in doing MORE without more money.  For more information on optimizing your data center environment, read full article here.