Cloud Computing Infrastructure: How To Choose the right Datacenter

Choosing a Datacenter

A datacenter is where you place your most valuable IT assets like your servers. For many companies though, the value of the server goes beyond the mere physical cost, but includes the information and business processes that are locked into it. These costs need to be protected and no measures are too great. While choosing a data center therefore, it is of critical importance that you choose one which you have confidence in.

This article will evaluate the various parameters on which a datacenter should be judged and how GigeNET measures up with respect to those standards.

Contents 1 Datacenter Selection and Moving 2 Parameters of a Datacenter 2.1 Environment 2.2 Physical Security 2.3 Digital Security 2.4 Access 2.5 Customer Support 3 GigeNET's Datacenter

Datacenter Selection and Moving

Many IT professionals choose their datacenter based on word of mouth or upon advertisements. However, there may be other considerations such as the proximity of the datacenter to your actual business location. Many business prefer it when their datacenters are close by, but this isn't as big a consideration as it once was. With the plethora of server moving companies all around, it's easier than ever to transfer your precious equipment into a fully featured datacenter.

Each business is different and when planning a move to a new datacenter, it's not possible to follow any one standard procedure. The individuality of a company's IT infrastructure ensures that any plan will be customized uniquely for your business alone.

Most likely you will find that the best datacenters like GigeNET's aren't immediately close to your physical location. However, the services and guarantees offered by these datacenters make it the right choice for your servers. After all, it's a question of protecting your investment.

In this section, we examine what exactly a world class datacenter has to offer that makes it worth your while to transfer your servers to it.

Parameters of a Datacenter

In order to judge the efficacy of a datacenter, there must be certain objective measurements that can be compared across businesses. This allows us to stack one datacenter up against another and evaluate their worthiness. Here are some of the important parameters on which datacenters must be judged.

Environment

A great deal of thought and worry goes into the perfect environment of a datacenter. This is because servers are delicate machines and a datacenter stacks them up close to each other. This results in the individual heat from each server to build up and unless an effective means to disburse this heat is found, it will result in severe damage to all the servers inside.

Apart from the heat, there are other issues such as dust and humidity that must be kept under control for the servers to remain operating and maximum efficiency. The more closely packed together the servers are, the more effective such measures need to be.

Fire detection and prevention is another aspect that is of crucial importance. It's impossible to overestimate the damage that can be caused by a fire and all appropriate measures must be take to prevent such an occurrence.

GigeNET for example, makes use of state of the art Liebert HVAC cooling systems that take care of other environmental factors such as dust and humidity. These systems are scientifically designed to make use of the mechanics of thermodynamics, heat transfer, and fluid mechanics in order to maintain optimal temperatures in high heat density environments.

The HVAC systems are so critical to the entire server environment, that they're deployed in a redundant architecture that provides a failsafe in case any one system goes down. This makes for a very high level of environmental control which will ensure that your servers are kept at a nice cool temperature.

When it comes to fire detection, GigeNET makes use of Very Early Smoke Detection Apparatus (VESDA) systems in order to completely eliminate the danger of a fire. A VESDA system consists of multiple components starting with continuous air samples taken from various areas of the room which are then filtered to remove dust particles. The clean air is then passed through a laser beam which scatters when it encounters even the most minute smoke particles.

The findings are then relayed to a graphic display which keeps a continuous bar graph of the smoke levels in the datacenter. VESDA systems can also integrate with other systems such as the HVAC systems. The sensitivity of the VESDA systems can be either manually or automatically set to minimize the chances of false alarms.

Physical Security

Software issues aside, your servers also represent a significant investment in hardware. While protecting servers from online attacks, one mustn't forget that they're equally vulnerable to physical ones. Good datacenters ensure that your servers are well locked away from those who have no business accessing them.

While choosing a datacenter, it's very important to find out if your provider actually owns the datacenter. If like GigeNET, they do own it, it's an indication that they have full control over the physical security of the servers and that the buck stops with them if something goes wrong.

Security measures such as 24 hr video surveillance along with proximity card readers are just the beginning of security and must be complemented with robust security procedures. Under no circumstances must the public be allowed access to the servers without an authorized datacenter person with them.

Locking cabinets ensure that even access to the datacenter itself does not necessarily mean that your servers are compromised. This adds an additional layer of security protecting your servers from most of the staff themselves.

GigeNET's private datacenter has all these security measures and more. With an area of 17,000 sq. ft in Chicago, we make sure that when you keep your servers with us, they stay as safe as if they were in your hands entirely.

Digital Security

Along with the physical security of the datacenter, it's critically important to be safe from digital attacks. These days, businesses are easily targeted by malicious entities - the recent experience of Google in China is a stark reminder to us all that our digital assets need equal protection.

DDoS attacks can especially cripple your business by denying legitimate customers access to crucial IT services. A good datacenter will have policies in place that can detect such an attack in its early stages and take corrective measures. GigeNET has powerful DDoS detection and mitigation capabilities can can stop such attacks in their tracks.

In addition, GigeNET's managed dedicated servers are kept up to date with the latest security patches, thus ensuring that not even freshly discovered holes can be exploited to gain access to your valuable data.

Access

When choosing a colocation center, you must ensure that you have no trouble accessing your server. Whether it's a dedicated managed server, a server which you manage by yourself, or a server that is your own, a sense of ownership is critically important for you to use it effectively. This can be a tricky job since your server is far away and software configuration problems can prevent you from accessing your server.

In addition, low level server access can be tough too. And in case something goes wrong such as the OS hanging, traditional remote access techniques that depend on the OS for access can go for a toss. Your datacenter should therefore allow you full access to your servers at a very low level - enabling you to perform operations such as rebooting and management of the server when the OS hasn't loaded.

GigeNET gives it's customers the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) and KVM over IP which allows them to access their servers even when there's a system failure at the server's end. In other words, it's just like sitting in front of the server itself.

Customer Support

This is a make or break parameter for a datacenter. Your servers are critical for your business and the last thing you need is unresponsive customer support. The evaluation of customer support goes way beyond mere communication, but also encompasses expertise and whether or not the people you contact actually have the ability to help you. Nothing is more frustrating than a well meaning and yet powerless customer care rep.

Here at GigeNET, we have fully qualified and technically certified experts who are available 24 hrs a day, 7 days a week whose sole job it is to assist you. In addition, we make sure that you're in touch with the same people each time so you don't have to waste your breath explaining your unique situation to a new person whenever you call.

We call this pinnacle customer support and it's more fully explained here. Since we also own our datacenter, our support staff actually have the ability to help your resolve your problems by going and fixing it themselves instead of having to ask permission from someone else. This makes a big difference and underlines the importance of dealing with the original owners instead of just a reseller.

GigeNET's Datacenter

GigeNET's datacenter based in Chicago is fully owned by GigeNET itself. Because of this unique control over every aspect of the datacenter, GigeNET can afford to provide the very best security and physical environment that is required for such delicate machinery.

Perhaps most importantly, it makes GigeNET's guarantees and promises completely credible since the power to implement them rests with the owner of the datacenter, and no other. By deciding to colocate your servers in our datacenter, you're handing them over to one of a handful of organizations that can afford to operate and maintain their own centers with the required level of expertise.

Our 17,000 sq. ft colocation center has one of the most extensive redundant network facilities available - receiving Internet access from eight different providers at the same time. Also, our state of the art Internap FCP system routes your traffic through the route with either the least latency or through whichever route maximizes the parameters you set. Compared to the old BGP protocol, the Internap FCP protocol is light years ahead.

Colocating with GigeNET means your servers will be in safe hands, and you have our guarantee on that!