Data centers have a lot of servers and other equipment that generate huge amounts of heat. As temperature rises, it adversely affects the performance of the data center, plus chances of wear and tear of equipment also increase. Therefore, cooling plays a very important part. Before building a data center you need to analyze your cooling requirements and design accordingly. For your existing data center, you should put in temperature monitoring and control equipment. One of the respondents said that for additional cooling on demand, you could also deploy emergency chillers.

Monitoring and management is another element. This helps CIOs evaluate the health of a data center on a real time basis. According to our survey, this was evenly split between either having a 24x7 monitoring set-up manned by in-house staff or a completely outsourced management model. Very few respondents said that they didn't have a dedicated monitoring set-up. So, one thing is pretty clear-a 24x7 monitoring should be in place for any data center, whether in-house or outsourced.

Disaster Protection
Disasters happen all the time and businesses that can best survive, win. To ensure survivability, businesses must have a disaster recovery (DR) program and infrastructure in place. Says the CIO of a large enterprise, "In this day and age of RoI, IT managers must think of the basic and critical business objectives of a DR program and infrastructure. IP-SAN serves near line data protection needs."

Businesses know that controller-based replication is a time-tested solution for disaster recovery. But what few people understand is the different types of replication, and how it meets their needs.

Many IT organizations today are challenged with moving their online and near-line data to offline tape backups and archives. The requirement for 24x7 application uptime dramatically shrinks the backup window. Yet the data volume on the multitude of servers, desktops, and laptops continues to grow at a rapid rate. While tape arrays and incremental backup solutions help achieve shorter backup windows, they are often complex and costly both for backup and restore. Hence, not many enterprises back up regularly, if at all.

For the data that is backed up, the latency of restoring data from tape is usually long. If the backup log, ie, the catalog is maintained online and the data maintained in a tape library, restoring it might take time. It could take hours, perhaps days, to retrieve the tape from an offsite vault before data can be restored.

To address these challenges, IT departments are now deploying low cost, cost-effective ATA disk arrays as a staging area, either as a front-end to a tape library or as a stand-alone appliance on the network.

This approach minimizes the impact on the application hosts and effectively eliminates the backup window issue. It also enables backup servers and the associated tape drives to be consolidated, to achieve further cost savings. Most Indian companies are looking at building DR capabilities by utilizing their existing Ethernet infrastructure and already available IP skill-sets of their IT technicians.

Gyana Ranjan Swain
gyanas@cybermedia.co.in