WITH THE END OF 2014 we reached the end of the PEDCA project, now we have the task of implementing the plan itself. One of our key objectives for 2015 is to encourage more member involvement in both DCA decision making and steering groups. There’s a range of activities and actions planned, largely based on feedback and ideas generated during the PEDCA project. This includes regular webinar calls, a reorganisation of the website, an annual DCA “symposium” event and more accessible steering groups. Each year the DCA steering groups will be asked to consider and report the following questions:
Is there a contribution to be made to:
£ Standards/Guidelines? For example, is there a best
practice missing or a gap that needs addressing or a
standard that needs improving or updating?
£ Research & Development? For example, is there
unanswered research question, can R&D funding improve
anything and can research councils be better informed?
£ Training and skills? For example, does existing training
and education meet the needs, is there a skill shortage in
any particular area or new skill in short supply?
£ Awareness activities? For example, does any aspect of the
topic need wider dissemination to any particular
stakeholder group or audience?
The plans include an annual event dedicated to DCA members (free of commercial sponsorship) to focus on these topics and air the group’s activities and goals. This will be at a date to be decided during the summer. It’s going to take some time to put all this into action, but work has already started. In December the DCA hosted an evening event focused on cooling and environmental control group’s topics at the Institute of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) in Westminster.
At the event, Dr Robert Tozer, Sophia Flucker and Dr Jon Summers presented key issues this sector of the data centre industry faces with the aim to foster collaboration to establish workshops where case studies, white papers and DCA actions can be formulated. A full report of this is to be found in this issue.
Cool, calm & collected
By Sophia Flucker, Director at Operational Intelligence.
THE DCA ENVIRONMENTAL CONTROL STEERING GROUP COOLING SUMMIT took place on Thursday 4th December 2014 at the Institute of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) in Westminster, London. The speakers were Dr. Jon Summer of the University of Leeds and Sophia Flucker and Dr. Robert Tozer of Operational Intelligence, who is the group chair.
The evening commenced with Simon Campbell-Whyte providing an introduction; Dr Jon Summers then gave a presentation on the challenges of getting heat out of a data centre and the application of liquid cooling.
Operational Intelligence presented on how environmental control is the basis of energy efficiency and shared a case study of how improvements were put into practice in a legacy data centre and the financial impact of this.
This highlighted the opportunities for reducing energy wastage through implementing best practice,
capitalising on the outdoor environment and minimising risk with a short ROI. Feedback from attendees included surprise at the long-term energy and risk benefits possible by optimising the air flow of data centres.
Forty people attended the interactive event and provided valuable feedback and contributions. Feedback was positive and delegates expressed a desire for regular workshops and events of this nature. Suggested topics included: supporting the EU code of conduct, more case studies, air management best practice, how to dispel popular myths amongst end users and data centre owners, new technologies and liquid cooling.
Furthermore, for the following event a desire for integration of different groups was suggested to tackle the silo-mentality of the industry.
After the “business” portion of the event was complete, all enjoyed a social drinks and canapés evening and welcomed the opportunity for networking and meeting new colleagues.
We will be holding a similar event in April together with other DCA groups, and will also be calling a workshop meeting in the spring to develop the proposal for additional case studies and whitepapers.
Presentations can be downloaded from:
http://www.data‐central.org/?page=EnvironContV2
Considerations for a successful data center transition
By Mat Jordan, EMEA Sales Director,
IT Asset Recovery, Procurri
FOCUS is given to deliberating who your new Datacenter provider will be, time is spent ensuring the correct redundancy, price, security and comms are in place; but all too often the forgotten relation until the move date is almost upon us is the practicalities of the transition itself. Potential lack of planning surrounding the physical move can lead to knee jerk decisions when time constraints become critical, and potentially expose you and your organisation to some of the highest risks to theft or loss of data. The most vulnerable time for attempted theft occurs when infrastructure is outside of the datacenter environment, outside of your datacenter, or a hosting company’s control.
Due consideration and planning should be given to the physical migration of hardware, and the environment the data is held throughout the relocation of hardware. With an ever growing focus, regulation and ultimately penalties being placed on businesses who fail to secure their data; planning for the physical relocation of hardware has to feature at the beginning of the discussion, rather than be buried at the back.
Discussion and planning should include:
Who will de-install the hardware at one location and re-install it at the next? Do they have base line security clearance? It is common practice, and reasonable to expect contracting staff to adhere to security checks to ensure no criminal records or historical dubious behaviour.
How is hardware to be moved? Common practice is to use non liveried , rigid sided vehicles with a no stop policy, in extreme circumstances there is the option to have a support vehicle follow the truck in case of break down or attempted theft; it has been known for criminals to use jamming devices to prevent a call for help from the primary transport vehicle.
How will data be managed, how sensitive is it? Should hardware undergo a secure CESG data erasure programme prior to leaving the facility, and be restored at its new location. There are currently two key data erasure providers Tabernus and Blancco, both of whom conform to CESG HMG IAS No.5 ;1 or 3 Overwrite (CESG is the Information Security arm of GCHQ, and the National Technical Authority for Information Assurance within the UK.
They are the definitive voice on the technical aspects of Information Security in Government.) , and US DoD 5220.22-m; 3 or 7 Overwrite (DoD is the USA Department of Defence), these certification levels should be present with any erasure provider, ask for proof of erasure level before you commit.
Is the company you are using independently certified through an organisation such as ADISA (www.adisa.org.uk )? Such organisations spot check members to
ensure security standards are maintained, and best practice implemented when handling data. A solution provider should
be able to work with you to road map a solution.
Options could be to consider a swing kit solution installing matched hardware at one site, ensuring data is transferred and restored and once satisfied, remove hardware from the original location. This can and does guarantee uptime. Alternately consider how will failures during transportation be managed, spares kits can be deployed to site ahead of a move to help minimise disruption due to faults during transport, the most vulnerable time for any hardware is during a power down, move and power up, especially legacy hardware that maybe hasn’t been powered down for a year or more, weak power supplies or disk are often found out during this period.
How many different partners should you engage, our suggestion is as few as possible to ensure continuity of support, look for a partner that is able to work with you proactively to develop a road map that suits your requirements, and provides assurances surrounding each of the areas detailed above.
Procurri is one potential solution provider you may wish to contact which ticks all the boxes. As an active member of the Data Centre Alliance (DCA) Procurri Group are helping to increase customer awareness of just how import it is to build the physical migration and or disposal of IT assets in to ones project and business plan at an early stage of any project life cycle.
In May 2014 Procurri Corporation Pte. Ltd headquartered in Singapore acquired Tinglobal which has helped to further strengthen the Groups Global position with a European addition; with offices and infrastructure now in Europe, North America, Latin America and ASIA (Singapore, Malaysia and China) Procurri are able to deliver imaginative, secure solutions to meet your business needs around the globe.
If you would like to find out more about the Procurri Group and how we could help your business make the right move then please contact Mat Jordan on matj@tindirect.com
Operational professionalism in global operations
By Mike Bennett, VP global data centre acquisition and expansion for CenturyLink.
COLOCATION INFRASTRUCTURE that extends around the world enables the easy delivery of the security, space, power and bandwidth needed to keep big businesses running smoothly. For many, the location of data centres is hugely important for geographic diversity and redundancy, IT asset protection and equipment failover.
However, the question always comes up: “why does it matter that a provider has over 50 data centres around the world if I need just one rack?” A fair question that has a lot to do with operational procedure and professionalism.
Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, having facilities around the world mitigates risk. How? Through knowledge sharing. Working to two types of incidents; the ‘abnormal incident’ and ‘avoidable error’ means that appropriate processes are put in place to ensure ‘one offs’ remain exactly that and not repeated time and time again by those that simply have not had a chance to learn from colleagues around the world. Humans will always make mistakes. The difference between one person learning from their mistake, and an entire global operation learning, is huge and requires a high level of professionalism. When an ‘avoidable error’ is recorded and shared, not as a reprimand, but as a method of knowledge sharing, processes and procedures can be put in place to benefit everyone. The lesson can come from the other side of the world or around the corner – it doesn’t matter. Essentially, everyone learns together and develops at a much faster rate as a result. When it comes to ‘abnormal incidents’; patterns are spotted almost immediately.
A ‘one off’ recorded as an abnormality but shared with 55 other data centres across the world can quickly reveal patterns. What could be neglected, and evolve into a serious problem, is able to be rectified without causing a minute of disruption.
Having a global operation also affords the luxury of having a team of people that specifically look into such issues. A lack of time or resource is never an issue. The flip side is that innovation is also shared globally. If a team member comes up with a great idea that works, then two-three weeks later it can be implemented across the world. If innovation happens anywhere, everyone benefits.
One of the most important advantages to global knowledge sharing is of course value for money. Power costs have gone through the roof. Back in the day, small efficiency improvements wouldn’t have been anything other than best practice – you wouldn’t reap a huge benefit. Now, those little efficiencies have a real, tangible impact on the bottom line. So much of the data centre is driven by what the engineers do on the floor and it’s sharing of little modifications and best practice that really make a difference to the bottom line.
Data centre design is key to fostering such an environment. When you have a Ferrari, you want to make sure it’s looked after. Having fellow owners and enthusiasts to bounce concerns and ideas off of benefits everyone. And let’s not forget that healthy internal competition can go hand in hand with professionalism. Engineers take real pride in their work and sharing their expertise with team mates.
Pushing for operational excellence
By Duncan Clubb, Managing Director, Align
DATA CENTRES may resemble massive structures made of bricks, steel, concrete and other hard stuff, but they can sometimes seem remarkably fragile and easy to break. And when data centres fail, all sorts of hell can break loose. The head of a data centre that specialises in hosting 70,000 small businesses recently told of how, if his data centre suffered an outage, within an hour 70,000 tweets hit the internet complaining about his company, and 70,000 businesses were without their web sites. You may also have seen the recent news about a good sized chunk of Western Australia losing internet access because of a data centre outage at one of its biggest ISPs.
A lot of time and money is spent designing data centres that should not fail – they have resilience designed and built into every critical system, but yet they still fail. Sometimes it can be put down purely to random failures of equipment, or other unpredictable failures and unfortunate coincidences, but most estimates are that at least 70-80% of data centre outages are down to human error. This means that no matter how well designed or built your data centre is, it is always going to be at risk of failure. That is because we cannot design data centres that run and maintain themselves automatically. Humans are always required at some level or other to keep them running. The important thing to remember is that whilst design is important, it only happens once (usually!)- but the data centre will be operating every hour of every day for a couple of decades. That represents a huge amount of potential for problems to occur.
The DCA has recognised the importance of data centre operations and set up a specialist group to look at operational excellence. Data centres are complex systems comprising of many different classes of critical equipment, but there are many excellent examples of facilities that are extremely well run and that do not (or at the very least are doing everything possible to ensure that they do not) suffer outages. A typical characteristic of well-run data centre is that they have relatively flat operations organisations.
By that, I mean that the team that operates and maintains the data centres critical systems are all well-trained, well-skilled and well-motivated. The data centres that have one or two “heroes” who know everything and a team of untrained drones are the ones at risk. Another key characteristic is quality of documentation, backed up by robust processes. Running a data centre 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, without unplanned outages, requires a very slick operational regime. The critical systems in a data centre comprise of a multitude of sub-systems, each of which will require some form of regular (if infrequent) maintenance. Having well thought out and understood processes for planned, preventative maintenance is vital for ensuring the resilience and security of data centres. The same goes for the processes that govern actions when things start to go wrong (crisis management), or for those things that just need to happen on an ad-hoc basis (change management).
Most professionals in the data centre industry understand that operational excellence can be achieved by all data centres, but that many operators have room for improvement. Historically, the focus has been on design and construction. The DCA is fully behind making sure that operations remains at the forefront of the data centre agenda. Many data centres are extremely well run, but most have had to learn how to do this from scratch.
The DCA will be trying to make sure that all data centre operators can benefit from the best practices built up over decades of experience. Inevitably, this will not mean dictating a single way of doing things, but sharing the characteristics of operational excellence so that data centre owners and operators can adapt the industry’s best practices to their own particular circumstances. There is also much to be learnt from the IT industry and other professional areas – surgeons, for example, followed the airline industry in adopting manual checklists and this has had a measurable impact on surgical outcomes.
The IT industry has ITIL, developed to manage service delivery, which has many useful features that could be extended into the engineering and facilities worlds.
In 2015, the DCA will publish an agenda for its operational excellence specialist group. This will lay out the plan for how the DCA will help its members define its own plans for developing the skills, training programmes and knowledge sharing that will be required.
There is a lot to do in terms of encouraging operational excellence throughout the industry, but the good news is that many of the operators in the market are already running excellent facilities and are open to sharing their experience.
Keysource approved as auditor for
DCA data centre certification scheme
KEYSOURCE, the leading data centre design and build specialist, has been approved as an official auditor for the DCA Data Centre Certification Scheme. The announcement builds on the work that Keysource has already done as members of the DCA in special interest and steering groups. Keysource has been a full partner of the DCA since 2013.
The industry-led DCA scheme provides a trusted quality mark which verifies facilities’ compliance and provides greater clarity for buyers and specifiers. It identifies and verifies four key areas of a facility, namely resilience, physical site security, energy efficiency credentials, and operational professionalism. The formal Certifications are made by independent experts, and projects are checked annually. The scheme provides transparent as well as affordable verification of data centres, in a way that can be easily understood by all stakeholders. Mike West, Managing Director at Keysource: “Our approval as auditors for the DCA scheme fits perfectly with our ongoing commitment to designing and delivering highly efficient infrastructures in business-critical environments safely, and in line with industry best practice.”
Keysource already has a number of Uptime Institute Accredited Designers within the business as well as being an active endorser of the EU Code of Conduct, so is keenly aware of what it takes to design facilities to meet exacting industry standards.
Justin Busk, Head of Safety, Health and Environment at Keysource, added: “The approval of Keysource as auditors means we can play an active role supporting organisations as they prepare to enter this valuable Certification scheme. It’s a natural fit and valuable addition to our range of professional services, which include specialist consultancy for safety, health, environment and compliance. We are fully behind this joined-up Certification initiative.”
DCA President Steve Norris said “I’d like to congratulate Keysource on this achievement, I know it is a demanding and stringent process we have laid down, I’m delighted that this highlights Keysource’s experience and expertise as one of the UK’s truly World Class data centre companies.”
DCA Chairman Adriaan Oosthoek added “I’m delighted Keysource’s commitment to quality throughout their organisation has been recognised by the DCA, Keysource brings added depth to the Certifications scheme which will in turn strengthen the data centres role in underpinning the growth and security of our digital world.”
