Data Centre Design For High Availability

It doesn’t matter whether you’re managing a data centre, server room, computer room, comms room or network operations centre. They’re all mission critical! Reducing downtime and increasing service availability are challenges you’ll be facing every day. So it’s really important if you’re taking on a data centre design project to take enough time to plan ahead for any downtime problems.

Designing for data centre builds
Experts agree that the most important factors for data centre design projects are:

• high availability
• simplicity
• flexibility and scalability.

High availability
Data centre design success is ultimately judged by operation continuity for the network services supported. Data centre service availability is influenced by both scheduled maintenance and unplanned events. And to optimise service availability, risk to service impact must be reduced and/or removed.

For example, to accommodate unplanned outages, both redundancy and fault-tolerance measures must be integrated into the data centre design and pre-planning.

Simplicity
Build simplicity into your data centre operations and you’ll be heading the right way towards managing, maintaining and monitoring your data centre successfully. Adopting too much complexity makes it difficult to uphold these three important responsibilities.

Flexibility and scalability
A data centre must allow for fast and smooth growth, and new service integration without creating disruption to operations or a large infrastructure overhaul.

Scalability contributes to flexibility. It means you plan for changes in requirements so that your data centre can support extensive growth without incurring damaging disruptions. Adopting modularity in design can help achieve this.

By: John Turner

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Plan with simplicity in mind when you manage a data centre design project.