A data center is a network of devices aiming to deliver applications and information between computers. Such facility requires at least 100 square meters in a building. Even windows aren’t necessary. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of data centers as they support a wide range of applications and activities, such as:
- storage, administration and recovery of information;
- conducting financial operations in large amounts;
- generating power for gaming;
- machine learning.
There are over 7,000,000 data centers in the world, as they’ve become more affordable in recent years. Despite this, it still can be very hard for a company to make such a facility all by itself. Fortunately, some organizations offer help with that, and Av5 is one of the best in this field. This provides its clients with the Data Center Build Out services. Just go to the official website (av5.com) of the company and contact it via a special form in the bottom of the page.
The Data Center Build Out service from Av5 has the following advantages:
- The company has been on the market for 15 years, so its specialists know even the smallest details of building a data center.
- Av5 has designed more than 500 networks without any security breaches.
- There have been over 2,000 servers racked and over 10,000 managed.
Basic Elements of a Data Center
Facility
The main thing to take care is the space which is used for all the used devices. Facilities provide 24-hour access to information, so they are really power-hungry. The room must be designed thoroughly, so that space in it would be optimized well. Moreover, there should be constant environmental control. It’s necessary because the equipment requires specific conditions, considering temperature and humidity. Otherwise, everything will break down quickly.
Core Components
A data center needs special electronic devices and programs in order to fulfill its tasks effectively. The list of devices and applications depends on many factors, such as the size, the main purpose, the price of the facility and the amount of people working on it. Engineers might need equipment for information storage, servers, wires and routers. Security is one of the most important aspects, so such elements, e.g. firewalls, are also implemented.
Support Infrastructure
The main goal of devices from this category is to maintain availability as huge as possible. This rate differs depending on a tier of the facility. It ranges from 99.67% to 99.99%. The most significant elements of support infrastructure are UPS, environmental control elements and physical security systems.
Operations Staff
Human resources are of high importance, as somebody should constantly monitor operations and check whether everything works properly. If there are any troubles and nobody can notice that, then a company will suffer huge losses.
Data Center Tiers
We’ve mentioned that data centers are divided into tiers. There are 4 categories. Such division is used because it’s an efficient way to describe what components are used in a data center.
- There is only one path for power and cooling in tier 1 facilities. Most of them aren’t even equipped with backup elements. Such facilities are up 99.67% of the time, so they are not available less than 29 hours every year.
- Tier 2 facilities are very similar. They are as simple as tier 1 data centers, but backup elements are more frequent in them. Their expected uptime is 99.74%. They are not available 22 hours every year.
- There are multiple paths for power, cooling and maintaining systems in tier 3 facilities. They are updated without going offline. These data centers are up 99.98% of the time. They are not available less than 2 hours every year.
- Tier 4 facilities are fault tolerant. They are equipped with redundancy for each element. Such data centers are up 99.99% of the time. They are not available less than 30 minutes every year, and that’s a perfect result.
Surely, tier 1 data centers are a lot simpler than tier 4 ones, for example. However, that doesn’t mean they are bad. There are lots of things to take into consideration while choosing the right option for each case, so leave the choice to specialists.
