Data center pros and cons?

Corporal79

Gawd
Joined
Oct 28, 2004
Messages
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Just hearing some rumors around my company that they are looking into possibly moving our servers to a data center.

Anyone gone from hosting internally to moving to a data center? The Director of IT is not pleased at all and I don't think I like the idea of having the severs off site.

Experiences, good or bad are welcome.

A quick search for bandwidth costs are better for in house, we pay around $3k for 50Mbps and some places are charging $1200/month per 10Mbps.
 
well cost is a big factor, it depends if they are going for hosting only really. They may be thinking of moving the entire IT operation over to the data center and reducing the number of in house IT staff. This could save them money but its always a risky business not having your IT in house.
 
I was with a company when they did this and a lot of people lost their jobs. I'm not sure how big your environment is, but ours was pretty big. They consolidated a ton of remote sites into one data center in Oklahoma. The cost savings was huge. They even 3rd partied out their helpdesk to the same NOC.

Service suffered and I went on to bigger and better things.
 
It's the way things are trending now. If you are not an IT company, outsourcing and colocation of your IT is a huge thing coming up and actualy happening now. IT is basicaly a commodity / facilities cost in the view of companys now. Heres a good read.
 
The company I'm working for has thought many times about having servers off site, but we have decided against it for twoo reasons:

1. we spent loads on building our own mini datacenter in our building. Thats hte obvious non technical reason.
2. Our real reason for not moving anything critical offsite is we will no longer have direct or immediate access to it. We would have to follow by someones rules and just won't have the freedom to do what we want with our IT Enterprise.
It is much easier when an HDD dies, to walk into the server room, rather than driving somewhere or trying to explain to someone over the phone waht is wrong. We also have the issue of cost, which we haven't really gotten into reading or researching about, though we figure our current solution is not hurting, and has helped the company many times.
 
Well one advantage of using a co-lo is they typically have far better disaster recovery systems, e.g. failsafe alarm systems, natural gas generators, halon fire suppression, etc
 
I am working on a project for one of my clients to relocate their internal data center to a level 3 data center hosted by the local Bell. They are lacking in many areas and this will solve a number of their problems. But as with anything, it will introduce a new set of problems. They have decided that the benefits of the hosted data center outweigh the risks. In this particular situation, I agree.

I'm not personally in favor of moving to a data center when it causes people to be laid off. In my clients case, they don't have the IT staff to support their equipment and having a hosted data center will help with this.
 
Well one advantage of using a co-lo is they typically have far better disaster recovery systems, e.g. failsafe alarm systems, natural gas generators, halon fire suppression, etc

Not calling you out or anything, but I believe halon systems are strictly regulated again in the US. Halon systems displace all the O2 with carbon dioxide and would potentiality kill people if they were in the room or walked into the room.

http://www.halon.org/epa/index.html
 
Not calling you out or anything, but I believe halon systems are strictly regulated again in the US. Halon systems displace all the O2 with carbon dioxide and would potentiality kill people if they were in the room or walked into the room.

http://www.halon.org/epa/index.html
I have worked many halon protected data centers. It's not that uncommon for older data centers. Part of the regulations require clearly marked exits and training. When one of them goes off, you get out of the room ASAP. Most fire suppression system for data centers sold now have this same stipulation.

Think of a fire as a triangle, with the sides being: Heat, Oxygen, and Fuel. Knock out any one site of the triangle and the and it collapses. In other words, you put out the fire. Water/liquids put out a fire by knocking out the heat. But, this isn't feasible in a data center. You can't move out the equipment, so you can't knock out the fuel. The last thing left is the oxygen. This is how these fire suppression system work. They remove the oxygen to put out the fire.
 
most large data centers (and banks!) use halon, it kills the fire and everything else.

there was a story about a woman who was locked in a Bank vault so she thought that if she set off the fire alarm then people would come and get her out. She didn't realise they used a halon fire system.

well you can guess the rest.
 
Halon = Nono
FM200 = OK (but not good)

Datacenters are my life.

Private datacenters are more likely to use FM200 because of the control on who is in or out. Good colocation facilities will NOT use either. Typically, HW does not burn too well so the risk of a rampant fire is not great.

The standard now is dual interlocking pre-action drypipe systems with zoned vesda.
 
Interesting, both of our NOCs use halon. Although I believe that was bid on by the property mgmt company, not us. I'll have to look into it further.

Edit: I should mention our NOCs are relatively small, and fully enclosed, with an independent HVAC system that is capable of sealing itself from the outside (per recent NIMS regulation).
 
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