Every IT organisation is under pressure to react and respond to
a rapidly changing business environment, changing business
priorities and higher user demands, with less available
spend. In particular, data centre infrastructure must respond
to these demands and transform from a traditional, somewhat
consolidated and virtualised environment to one that is efficient,
automated and service oriented, thereby driving cost reduction,
reducing management complexity, and enabling growth.
Today’s data centre must be a highly provisioned and
operationally efficient business asset, a mix of architectural
excellence and best in breed management solutions wrapped with a
personalised operational and service model.
Data
centres are, generally, physically secure locations used to
host an organisation’s IT systems - such as servers, storage and
backup facilities. A typical data centre design will provide space
for hardware in a controlled environment, for instance using power
and environmental cooling and air conditioning to enable the
equipment to perform at its optimum level with maximum system
availability.
A data centre provides various levels of resilience in the form
of backup power supplies and additional communications connections
that may not be used until a problem occurs with the primary system
- this is known as redundancy.
The main purpose of a data centre design is to run core
business applications and store operational data as well as
providing Disaster Recover (DR) facilities. Typical applications
will be enterprise software systems such as Enterprise Resource
Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
services.
Common components include firewalls, VPN gateways, routers and
switches, database servers, file servers, application servers, web
servers and middleware - all contained on physical hardware or on
consolidated and virtualised platforms.
The Telecommunication Infrastructure Standard 942 provides
guidance on standardisation of data centre design and classifies
data centres into four tiers with level 4 being the most fault
tolerant and guaranteeing 99.995% uptime, compared with Tier 1
which will guarantee 99.671% uptime. This standardisation is
important for customers to understand and measure service providers
against.
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