Is Your Data Disaster-Proof?

Hurricane Sandy, the largest storm to hit the East Coast since meteorologists started keeping records, destroyed thousands of homes, and three months later there are still dozens of commercial properties that are uninhabitable. The impact to the business community, however, was far greater than those directly displaced by the storm. Thousands of websites were knocked offline. Businesses lost email, online stores, and other critical business applications for days or weeks while electricians, telecommunications engineers, and IT professionals worked to restore services.

The reality of natural disasters-even large ones-is that the vast majority of the world, including your customers and suppliers, is not affected. While local customers may be unable to access their e-commerce website or send email, the rest of the world certainly can. In a competitive business climate, that means businesses must be prepared or they will lose opportunities to their competitors.

Data Center Choices

One of the benefits of the digital age is that location doesn't matter. A business can operate factories all over the globe and have a distributed workforce whose working hours follow the sun. Companies can erect a digital storefront that takes orders 24 hours a day without the expense of staffing a traditional bricks-and-mortar establishment. Such a premise proves false, however, when it comes to the location and design of a company's IT and data infrastructure. In fact, as businesses and the workforce become more mobile, we become more dependent on the systems and applications that enable that mobility.

Behind every application delivered via the Internet-whether internal email, a corporate website, or a cloud-based application like SalesForce-there is a data center designed to hold a company's computer servers, data storage and the networking equipment that is needed to run the business. The data center is typically equipped with electrical, cooling and networking systems that are used to protect the equipment from failure. The data center may be a closet prone to overheating within a company's offices, a cloud computing facility, or a modern-day outsourced data center facility operated by a third party. These facilities vary in size, sophistication, and levels of redundancy.

Companies that place data and systems in a specialized facility with multiple redundant Internet connections, commercial-grade cooling equipment, and onsite backup electrical systems and generators consistently fare better than those that do not. Many firms outsource data backup to a specialty provider because they can avoid much of the effort associated with building and maintaining the systems, and instead focus on growing their own business.

The three critical elements of a data center are highly available electricity, ultra reliable cooling and humidification, and diverse and redundant networking. These elements are even more relevant to businesses in NH because severe winter storms can significantly interfere with business operations.

Modern-day servers and data storage equipment depends on a large amount of electricity. Supplementing the utility power feed with battery backup systems and onsite backup generators provides a highly available electric supply. The more power consumed by computing and storage resources, the more cooling is needed to keep them at their ideal condition. While servers can operate in a wide temperature range, they are more prone to failure when they are consistently operating in an environment above 75 degrees. Finally, a properly equipped data center needs a redundant and diverse Internet network. Companies that take advantage of multiple service providers, using the incumbent provider such as FairPoint and also using an additional provider like Comcast, Sidera, or Lightower reduces the chances of a network outage.

As more firms invest in Information Technology and move more business to the Internet, they are becoming increasingly dependent on the successful operation of their data center. Firms are finding outsourced service providers can help meet uptime and performance needs, while also controlling the costs and complexity associated with operating highly available data center environments. 

Aaron D. Sawchuk is co-founder and chairman of ColoSpace Inc., a provider of application hosting, colocation, and disaster recovery services based in Massachusetts, with operations in Bedford, NH. He can be reached at asawchuk@colospace.com, 888-583-9200, or visit www.colospace.com.