6 Sacred facts you need to know for a High-Availability Data Center Design

For decades now, data centers are known for its high-availability and reliability, but some technical experts claim that these reliability needs to be upgraded. Data centers are concentrating more on infrastructure enhancement, which is less than important and not always going to benefit customers. Instead, they should start building schemes and plans that will suit specific needs of organizations.

Designing data center redundancy plans more than required will lead to wastage of finance. Here are some factors that need to be considered.

1. Reliability simply doesn’t come from updating the infrastructure designs or improving redundancy. But, increasing component redundancy makes the system more difficult to manage that actually brings down reliability.
2. To increase reliability level, data centers need to support the need of the applications installed in it. It is certainly not a right approach to update the infrastructure and not focusing on the application requirements. This is generally considering the difference between the cost of Tier I and Tier II, and between Tier III and IV. However, the cost difference between Tier I and Tier II, and Tier III and Tier IV is usually a small amount. But, if you are planning to shift directly from Tier I to Tier IV, the cost will be enormous.
3. Moving from a 2N UPS configuration module to 2(N+1) configuration, is neither going to help improve redundancy nor reliability. 2N module is a completely redundant system and is highly reliable than 2(N+1), thus data center must avoid replacing them since it increases the probability of failure.
4. Instead of using (N+1), 2N generator configuration can bring a relative difference in the availability. The failure probability is comparatively less than the aforementioned pointer.
5. Consider developing generator redundancy as you can’t be entirely dependent on these generators during the power outage. Generators may collapse when it needs to run for a considerably prolonged period, even though it performed well initially.
6. Though Tier system is one of the many elements that defines data center reliability, there are several other factors that needs to be taken into account to upgrade reliability. It includes the location of the data centers, construction, maintenance practices, quality of services and many other that will not only develop the infrastructure but also provide optimum solutions to users.