Data Centres: Safety, Efficiency And Seamless Operation

Seamless operation of data centres is a must, according to large businesses like Goldman Sachs Group, an investment bank that has recently launched a long-term datacentre strategy for its U.K., U.S., and Singapore divisions. With new high-availability data centres, the company is expected to “enhance its online banking capabilities”, Nationwide building society believes.

The data centre industry is constantly evolving and expanding, so all big businesses like the ones mentioned above will need to adopt a flexible approach in order to continue the growth. Each company may need to ensure that its data centre’s physical infrastructure can adapt quickly to support future demand, without ever compromising operational efficiency. For this, they can possibly seek consultation from experts in the field such as Walt Coulston, for instance.

When the infrastructure is ready, the company is sure to flourish with little to no downtime and no loss of efficiency. However, to ensure that the physical infrastructure of a data centre is up to the mark, you will need to take care of a lot of necessities, including servers, monitoring structure, storage, cooling and airflow system, fire protection, and security system. For instance, you may need an alarm system, employee access control, CCTV cameras, and perhaps technology like unbreakable glass for doors and windows to establish an unfailing security system for a data center. All these physical facilities will ensure that the server runs uninterrupted and without any issues.

Going Virtual:

Data centres are must-have solutions that allow companies to “confidently seize the business benefits offered by virtualisation”, commented Said Rechchad, acting general manager for Cisco Nigeria. Virtualisation is expected to bring “a nearly 3000 per cent increase in application traffic and network connections per second by 2015”.

According to Don Duet, global co-chief operating officer of the technology division at Goldman Sachs, going virtual with data centres allows businesses to scale their operations more efficiently, and “further advance the firm’s broader commitment to environmental stewardship and reduced carbon footprint”.

Data Protection:

A lot of companies have realized how important it is to protect data stored online. For instance, the Australian intelligent agency ASIO decided to force companies to store phone and Internet data for two years to do just that. Moreover, companies may also have to run a background check and police check victoria (or in other locations) to ensure that employees don’t have a history of cybercrimes. Internal data leaks can cause more damage than an external attack since you might have firewalls and other precautions set in place for data center safety.

Cisco believes that the security of data centers is the main principle of their operation, that’s why the company chose to ensure data protection by unifying physical and virtual worlds. On a similar note, businesses nowadays tend to hire IT teams (you can look at IT Management lincoln ne for your reference) that can monitor and protect your business data from cyber attacks. IT teams also stay updated with the latest cybercrime trends so that they can respond immediately to a potential threat.

Further Development:

A Facebook engineer contributed to the seamless operation of data centres by developing heat-map software called Claspin to identify server, rack and cluster failures. The tool uses the heat map format to quickly find potential problems in data centres.

The heat map shows the operational status of every component represented as a cell on a large matrix. The colour of the cells helps figure out whether each component is operating properly: a green cell corresponds to proper component operation, while a red sell is a sign that something is not operating correctly.

With this new technology being a success within Facebook, more and more engineering groups begin to use heat maps to optimise data centres. The good news is that Facebook is going to release Claspin as open source, though it might be difficult as the tool was developed specifically for Facebook infrastructure.