How Do You Evaluate a Data Center? 211
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ScuttleMonkey
from the check-for-major-fault-lines dept.
from the check-for-major-fault-lines dept.
mpapet writes to ask about the ins and outs of datacenter evaluation. Beyond the simpler questions of physical access control, connectivity, and power redundancy/capacity and SLA review, what other questions are important to ask when evaluating a data center? What data centers have people been happy with? What horror stories have people lived through with those that didn't make the cut?
Re:Just off the top of my head (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't forget the non-technical bits (Score:3, Interesting)
Ease of recruiting / retaining sufficiently qualified staff in the locale, or persuading your to commute or relocate
Is the on-site restaurant / canteen or local eateries likely to give everyone food poisoning (this could be a single point of failure)
Local crime rate - number of times the facility has been broken in to - even the amount of graffiti on the walls could be a negative indicator
Re:Just off the top of my head (Score:5, Interesting)
- Raised floor is certainly important, and a given. Check
- Cable management above AND below the floor. This is not an either-or... Check
- Cooling capacity is hard to judge, should be scalable. Redundancy is often overlooked but is often even more important that capacity... Check
- Power quality: never seen a big datacenter without a Liebert, or at least UPS in every rack. Power does not have the be contitioned except between the UPS and the machines/devices. A whole data center power conditioner is often more efficient, but unnecessary for the little guys. either way - check.
- Age is irrelevent as long as it's under support. If it's not, replace it. Generators need to be run several times a year to validate their condition, and also to grease the innards... See too many good generators get kicked on and fail an hour later because the oil hand't been changed in 3 years....
- Outages should be tracked, by system, rack row, and power distro. When system seem to be going down more frequently in one area, there's usually an underlying reason... As Google recently proved as well for us all, do not ASSUME all is well, routine disgnostics including memory scans should be performed on ALL hardware. Even ECC RAM deteriorates with age (rapidly) and needs to be part of a maintenance testing and replacement policy - Check.
- Fire suppression is usually part of your building codes, and a given, as is the routine checks (at least anually) by law.
In addition, we deploy:
- Man traps on all enterences to data centers. You go in one door, it closes, then you authenticate to a second door. A pressure plate ensures only one person goes in/out at a time (and it it's tripped, a scurity guy looking at a screen has to override).
- Full 24x7 video surveilance of the data centers.
- in/out logs for all equipment. To take a device in/out of a datacenter requires it being logged in a book (by a designated person). This is for anything the size of a disk/tape and larger. All drive bays are audited nightly by security and if drives go missing, security reviews the access logs and server room security footage to see who might have taken them.
- clear and consistent labeling systems for rack, shelves, cables and systems.
- pre-cable just about everything to row level redundant switches, and have no cabling from server to other servers not passed through a rack/row switch first. Row switches connect to distro switches. This ensures cabling is simple, and predictable.
- Colorcoded cabling: we use 1 color for redundant cabling (indicating their should be 2 of these connected to the server at all times, and to seperate cards in the backplane and seperate switches to boot), a seperate color for generic gigabit connections, another color for DS View, another color the out management network(s), another color for heartbeat cables, and yet another for non-ethernet (T1/PRI/etc). Other colors are used in some areas to designate 100m connections, special connectivity, or security enclave barriers, and non-fiber switch-to-switch connections. Every cable is labled at both ends and every 6-8 feet inbetween.
- FULLY REDUNDANT POWER. It's not enough to have clean poewr, and good UPS and a generator. In a large datacenter (more than a few rows, or anything truly mission critical), you should have 2 seperate power companies, 2 seperate generators, and 2 fully segregated power systems at the datcenter, room, row, and rack levels. in each datacenter we use 2 Liebert mains, each row has a seperate distribution unit connected to a differnt main, and each rack has 4 PDUs (2 to each distro). Every server is connected to 2 seperat PDUs, run all the way back to 2 completely independent power grids. For a deployment of 50 servers or so this is big time overkill. We have over 3500 servers, we need this... We can not rely on a PSU failure taking out racks at a time which may server dozens of other systems each.
Re:Just off the top of my head (Score:4, Interesting)
Presumably the OP is looking for a hosting site, or processing center, rather than looking at purchasing the facility.
If so very few of the items mentioned in the parent post are germane, other than Outage/Uptime History. What is under the floor is not your problem in hosting arrangement.
You might be interested in location (flood plain, quake zone) and, but if the place has been in business for more than 10 years it all boils down to Outage/Uptime History.
The cost, and ease of migration should the relationship sour and the names of the last big customers to exit the facility would be nice to know.
Re:Just off the top of my head (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Some important questions: (Score:4, Interesting)
Just want to add... Don't let them pick the tile. They probably get this request frequently enough that they have a "show" tile or two if they are a shoddy organization. Pick one on your tour, as an offhand request that you had "forgotten" until then. If they try to steer you to a specific tile, that tells you they have something to hide, and you need to question everything else they've shown you samples of.
[paranoid and loving it]
Freight Elevator capacity... (Score:3, Interesting)
I used to have a large cage in an Exodus colocation facility. Turns out that if we wanted to put in an EMC Symm5 (these are three tiles wide), we would have to rent a fork lift and put it through an open rollup door on the second floor. Their "freight elevator" was barely big enough for two people and a dolly.
One of my other cages was housed in a Global Crossing facility; when they started to run out of out cooling, they would hook up huge external A/C units in the parking lot and run 2ft diameter ducting to a hole in the wall. If you happened to walk near one of these openings you'd be greeted by freezing 50mph winds.
Anybody find it odd that Exodus bought Global Crossing, who then went out of business?
I'm going to turn this around. (Score:5, Interesting)
I am the Director of Operations for our DC. When we give tours, I explain the following (pseudo order of the tour):
- Begin with the history of the building, when it was built (1995), why it was build (result of Andrew in 1992), and how it is constructed (twin T, poured tilt wall).
Infastructure:
- Take you through the gen room, show you it is internal to the building, show you the roofing structure from the inside, explain the N+1 redundancy, the hours on the gens, when they are ready for maintenance, how they are maintained, by whom (the vendor), how the diesel is stored, supplied, duration of fuel at max and current loads. Explain conduct before a hurricane or lockdown, how we go off grid 24hours ahead of a storm, mention our various contracts for after storm refill and our straining / refill schedule.
- Take you to the switch gear room, explain the dual feeds from the power company, how the switch gear works, show you the three main bus breakers, show you the numerous other breakers for various sub panels, etc. Explain and show you the spare breakers we have in case replacement is needed.
- Take you to the cooling tower area, explain the piping, the amount of water flowing, the number of pumps, how many are needed, the switching schedule, explain the N+1 capacity and overall capability of the towers, explain maintenance, show you the replacement pumps in stock, explain the concept of condensed water cooling if needed.
- Take you through the UPS and battery rooms, explain the needed KW capacity, what the UPSs back up and what they do not. Show the various distribution breakers out to floor, their capacity, the static switches, bypass, explain the battery capacity, type of cells, number of cells, number of strings, last time the jars were replaced and how they are maintained. Explain max capacity of the load vs time. Answer questions relevant to switching from utility->UPS->generator and back.
Raised floor:
- Take walk on raised floor, explain connectivity, vendors, path diversity we have, how the circuits are protected. Show them network gear, dual everything, how we protect from a LAN or WAN outage, and specific network devices we have for DDoS, Load Balancing, Distribution, Aggregation. Explain how telco and others deliver DS0 to OC-12 capacity, offer information on cross connections regarding copper, fiber, coax. Explain our offerings (dedicated servers up to 5K sq ft cages) and ask what they are interested in.
- Explain below the floor, size of raise, that power and network is delivered under, what are on level one trays, level two trays, and the piping for cooling. Show the PDU units and how they related to the breakers in the previous rooms. Show them the cooling panel and leads out to CRAC units, explain the cooling capacity, plans for future cooling, explain hot/cold aisle fundamentals, and temperature goals. At this point, there are usually more questions about vented tiles, power types available and overall floor density in watts/sq ft.
- Explain the fire detection / mitigation system, monitoring of PDU's, CRAC units, and FM200. Explain the maintenance of the fire system, show them the fire marshal inspection logs and the panels that alert the police and fire departments (both on floor and in our security office in front).
- While finishing the walk on the floor, show cameras, explain process to bring in and remove equipment, tell them the retention on the video, explain the rounds the guards make, the access list updates and changes.
NOC:
- At this point we're back to the front of the building, go into the NOC, explain what we are monitoring (connectivity, weather, scheduled jobs, etc). Introduce NOC and security staff, explain they will always get a person if they call, submit a test ticket from a e-mail on my phone, they will see the alerts light up and the pager for the NOC will signal. The final steps are to introduce them to security and then I'll lead the customer(s) to the conference room so they can continue the conversation
Re:Just off the top of my head (Score:3, Interesting)
As you indicate, these are hardly simple questions!
While I would not endorse them today, for years I hosted at GNI, part of 365 Main. Things generally worked well, even if their staff were terse and often unfriendly, so I had no particular complaints until they had a power prolem that cost us about 2000 in direct cost and about two business days to finally, fully resolve. The amount of terse double-speak that came out of them left a very bad taste in my mouth and I've left as soon as I could. Stay clear of 365 Main!
Our new colo is Herakles Data in Sacramento. There, too, things have pretty much 'just worked', but they so much nicer to deal with! And when the inevitable downtime did happen (a 'brownout' on the part of one of their redundant Cisco routers) they were quick to explain exactly what happened and even sent us forms in case we wanted to make a claim against our SLA! (I didn't bother just because I appreciated the respect they afforded me)
And it goes further - when I asked their sales guy about the best way to get a server ack for the development, they GAVE me one that they had replaced because of size limits for FREE! On paper, both colos are similar, with full redundant everything, plenty of certification and nice, glossy promo materials.
In practice, they are like night and day.
Re:Just off the top of my head (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Some important questions: (Score:4, Interesting)
Just want to add... Don't let them pick the tile. They probably get this request frequently enough that they have a "show" tile or two if they are a shoddy organization.
If you pull this stunt, please understand that a techs hidden stockpile of magazines and canned soda does not necessarily indicate a shoddy organization, it merely means they have employees that like reading certain magazines for the interviews, and prefer to store their drinks in a nice clean spot underneath the chiller rather than the proverbially filthy employee refrigerator. On the good side this is a strong indication they don't have an under the floor rodent infestation.
Strangest thing I ever found under the floor was a vast amount of one employees (clean) clothing. He was kind of stuck in the process of moving and needed a temporary place to stash stuff. Apparently no one found it unusual that he was hauling bags of clothing in and out.
Re:Just off the top of my head (Score:2, Interesting)
One thing not mentioned: a rigorous procedure for handling of decommissioned equipment. Failure to have proper audit mechanisms in place for hw removal is asking for data theft.