Weatherproofing The Data Center
Most customers know chapter and verse on how to weatherproof their homes. Now it's up to you to weatherproof their data centers.
Data center expansion continues at a blistering pace in the market. Server, storage and application consolidation is a key driver. The buildout of VoIP solutions for small and midsize businesses is another. Virtualization, security, the proliferation of dedicated devices that sit on the rack—it's all adding up to more horsepower for the masses of businesses, government offices and workgroups.
The pluses: Smaller businesses now have the chance to get the same edge and benefits of high-end technology that was once the exclusive province of Fortune 500 IT departments. The minuses: Many of those same smaller businesses don't have the budget or wherewithal to keep an eye on rising temperatures in smaller data centers, which can reduce or eliminate ROI; keep an eye on airflow, which could indicate blocked ducts, broken fans or worse; or keep an eye on physical security, which could increase risks by orders of magnitude. (Dude, don't put that propane tank next to the SunFire server!)
CRNtech pursued two tracks for this report. One track focused on an examination of a couple of out-of-the-box solutions for establishing data center monitoring of a few key metrics (including heat and humidity), as well as a discussion of best practices with a solution provider who has a growing business bringing small and midsize companies into the wonderful but sometimes overly complex world of data center computing.
Where better to find a solution provider who knows about these issues than at a company called Five Nines Technologies, which focuses largely on keeping small and midsize businesses up and running at or better than the gold standard of 99.999 percent uptime?
Ben Pankonin, director of business development at Five Nines, Lincoln, Neb., says there are several keys to working with a customer to deliver the right solution to monitor the data center. Some of those steps involve developing skills in key areas, but they also include knowing the customer and, for the solution provider, knowing his or her degree of skill and competency as well. Pankonin says his company delivers a variety of different data center monitoring solutions and tools, depending on the data center, the customer, the customer's budget and other factors.
While you may believe that data center monitoring is just another rudimentary exercise, as you'll see below it's possible for a solution provider to lose business to a competitor if the right amount of attention isn't paid to details.
Data center monitoring and, when the situation calls for it, remote monitoring, is vital and almost inexcusable not to implement. The good news is that there are products and practices now available in the channel to offer high-end protection to small and midsize businesses. Once a solution provider convinces the customer to think of a data center as he or she would a home, the rest can fall into place.
Next: Five Steps To Weatherproofing A Customer's Data Center Here are five steps to weatherproofing a customer's data center, and how it could win you someone else's business.
Know what your skills are, and what they are not.
With ever-declining prices for servers, as well as solutions such as VoIP, businesses are seeking to crowbar more into data centers, and more data centers into smaller-size locations.
It's not just important for solution providers to understand the networking, the data center architecture and management. How about the building's wiring?
"As a VAR, I'm familiar with what type of UPSes to put in, and what power is appropriate," Pankonin said. "But I also have to be aware that there's a line in the sand where I want to refer them to an electrical engineer and an electrical architect. That's a very important thing for VARs to keep in mind."
Partnering with another company that has important, non-data center skills where the solution provider doesn't, when essential, becomes key to delivering a rounded solution to protect the data center.
Know when to bring up the topic of data center protection.
Data centers aren't created for looks, and they're not created because businesses have a lot of extra money and nothing to do with it. They are planned, purchased, configured and integrated to perform a task or tasks—like improving communications, conducting transactions, keeping track of customers, maintaining employee records and otherwise running a business.
Solution providers already spend time talking to their customers about server configurations, operating systems, middleware, firewalls, remote management, VPN access and other speeds and feeds. Condition monitoring and all its nuances might not get so much attention. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't.
"The easiest time to bring up monitoring is either after they've had a problem or when you're initially constructing the data facility," Pankonin said. "Those are the easiest times to have that conversation."
Before you set up a monitoring solution, pick an alert system you, the solution provider, can live with.
Some solution providers spend much of their time on the road between service and sales calls. Some spend much of their time in a lab, planning, testing or building out a custom solution. Others are full-time managed service professionals whose job is to keep an eye on customer uptime. Some have customers with internal IT departments, some are the customer's IT department. Whatever way you work or model your business, keep that in mind when providing a data center monitoring solution.
"Data centers have to somewhat fit into a managed service philosophy," Pankonin said. "If you are the VAR and you are determining how things are going to be monitored, you have to determine how you are going to get that type of information after the data center is built."
Know what information your customer should get, and how often.
For this report, CRNtech took a look at American Power Conversion Corp.'s NetBotz 420 data center monitoring appliance. Included in that package is software that allows a solution provider to program "escalated" alerts to ensure that a customer's management isn't notified of an event unless it's critical enough that he or she would want to receive an e-mail or an SMS text message at any hour of the day.
"We just took over for a customer last week, and their previous IT vendor used almost the exact same monitoring package we were using, but just didn't configure it correctly," Pankonin said, noting that the customer received much more alert information than was comfortable.
"Your [alert] thresholds need to be set accurately, so you and your customer get the appropriate amount of feedback and information," he said.
Know how the data center protection solution fits into the customer's ROI needs.
Pankonin and others say that ROI is a natural part of the conversation as data center buildout, configuration and management are planned. That ROI doesn't just include avoiding downtime and associated costs, but also in keeping a watchful eye on heat output in a data center (which can be a critical indicator of energy inefficiency), airflow (which can be an early tipoff to problems with cooling and fans) and physical security—a videocamera can alert an IT manager, workgroup manager, a business owner or a solution provider to risks caused by open access to a data center, employees who may not belong near a data center or other potential hazards. (Remember that propane tank?)
A $1,000 monitoring appliance could save real money down the road in lower energy costs, lower security costs and more efficiency.
Next: Two Different Monitoring Products Two Different Monitoring Products
As Pankonin noted, there's a wide spectrum of products and solutions that can provide monitoring capabilities for the data center, and many of them do keep a finger on the pulse of climate conditions. Two such products come from significantly different ends of that spectrum: APC's NetBotz 420, which can sit in a data center rack along with servers, storage and cables; and the EL-USB-2 Rh-Temp Data Logger by Lascar Electronics, which sells for about a hundred bucks with logging and alert software. The former appears to be a channel-ready, data-center-optimized solution with realtime, Web-based remote management capability. The latter not so much, although it does function as advertised and can serve as an on-the-go tool that a solution provider can toss into a briefcase for use when needed.
The NetBotz 420: List-priced at $1,975 for the model that comes with an integrated videocamera, the Test Center installed the NetBotz 420 in its data center to get an idea of its ease of deployment, ease of use, effectiveness, customizability and ROI case. Installation was fairly straightforward (once we got past a minor typo in the documentation that told us, when putting the device on the network, to enter a product name that included the last six digits of the serial number when, in fact, we had to include the last six digits of the MAC address. That set us back five or 10 minutes.). Once installed, the device feeds realtime data streams into a data-logging application that watches heat, humidity, fluid accumulation, noise, airflow and motion. It does provide additional ports for more sensors that can be placed away from the data center. NetBotz 420 provides software that allows for a PC-based application dashboard for monitoring and setting alert thresholds and e-mail notification preferences, or it's possible to simply click on the IP address for the device and access the management console via Web browser.
Remote management also could be developed either by telnet or through APC's InfrastruXure Center—which offers Web-based access to a data server that integrates with NetBotz for a remote view of the realtime data.
Luckily for the Test Center, we've got a boring data center. According to the data charts provided by the NetBotz, there was no motion (as measured by the camera) or sound between the time we left our lab for the night and when we arrived the next morning. Temperature in the data center began to increase at about 4 a.m., but that's when the building's heat kicks in before the workday. Airflow in the rack enclosure spiked for about 90 seconds one night, around 1 a.m., when everything else was running consistently, so perhaps it was a case of a mouse with a coughing fit. We fiddled with the e-mail alert thresholds and found that they were easily altered by the administrator. The integrated security camera is a natural feature for the device, and allows an administrator to keep tabs on who gets near the racks, and when.
The EL-USB-2: For small or stubborn customers not willing to make an investment in managed services or data center monitoring, the EL-USB-2 device could come in handy. A few notes: While it's handy, easy to carry around and install on any 32-bit Windows-based server or PC, it's pretty rudimentary and monitors only relative humidity and temperature. It does provide data-logging software and allows you to customize the data-capture intervals (from five seconds to every hour) and saves it into text and graphics files on the PC itself. This model and software don't provide e-mail notification. Our recommendation: Consider picking up one or two of these devices to throw in your briefcase for on-the-fly monitoring scenarios.
The bottom line: For a fraction of the cost of recovering lost data, suffering a server outage or running energy-eating and inefficient hardware, data centers and wiring closets can now have their own, dedicated IT monitoring solution with little hassle. And if customers still aren't convinced, they may be ready to talk about it after a major incident.