data center

Inside of a data center

What is the data center tier and classification system of the data center tier?

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Data center tier
Data center tier refers to a standardized classification system that categorizes data centers based on their infrastructure design, reliability, redundancy, and availability. The tier system provides a way to evaluate and compare the resilience and performance capabilities of different data centers. The most commonly used tier system is the one developed by the Uptime Institute, a globally recognized organization for data center reliability and efficiency.

Classification system of data center tier by the Uptime Institute

The Uptime Institute’s tier classification system consists of four tiers:

1) Tier I: Tier I data centers have basic infrastructure components and provide a non-redundant environment for IT equipment. They have a single path for power and cooling, meaning they are susceptible to planned and unplanned downtime. They typically have an availability of approximately 99.671%, with a maximum of 28.8 hours of annual downtime.

2) Tier II: Tier II data centers offer some redundant components and infrastructure, providing improved reliability compared to Tier I. They have redundant power and cooling distribution paths but lack redundant components within those paths. They generally achieve an availability of around 99.741%, with a maximum of 22 hours of annual downtime.

3) Tier III: Tier III data centers have a concurrently maintainable design, ensuring that individual infrastructure components can be taken offline for maintenance or replacement without disrupting the IT operations. They feature multiple independent power and cooling distribution paths, allowing for maintenance without downtime. Tier III data centers aim for an availability of approximately 99.982%, resulting in a maximum of 1.6 hours of annual downtime.

4) Tier IV: Tier IV data centers provide the highest level of reliability and fault tolerance. They have redundant components, multiple independent distribution paths, and are designed to withstand individual equipment failures or planned maintenance without any disruption to IT operations. Tier IV data centers offer an availability of approximately 99.995%, with a maximum of 0.4 hours of annual downtime.

These tiers help data center owners, operators, and clients understand the level of infrastructure resilience and availability provided by a facility. Higher-tier data centers generally require more redundant systems and are designed to provide better uptime and fault tolerance. However, achieving higher tiers involves increased costs due to the additional infrastructure and redundancy requirements.

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What is data center PUE and the importance of PUE?

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Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE)
Data center PUE stands for Power Usage Effectiveness. It is a metric used to assess the energy efficiency of a data center. PUE is calculated by dividing the total amount of power consumed by the data center (including IT equipment, cooling systems, lighting, etc.) by the power consumed solely by the IT equipment (servers, storage devices, networking equipment, etc.). The formula for calculating PUE is as follows:

PUE = Total Facility Power / IT Equipment Power

Ideally, a data center would aim for a PUE of 1, which would mean that all the power consumed by the facility is solely used for running the IT equipment. However, achieving a PUE of precisely 1 is extremely challenging, and most data centers have PUE values greater than 1.

Importance of PUE Value

A lower PUE value indicates higher energy efficiency. For example, a data center with a PUE of 1.5 means that for every 1.5 units of total power consumed, 1 unit is used by the IT equipment, and 0.5 units are consumed by the cooling, lighting, and other non-IT systems. Data center operators strive to minimize PUE by implementing energy-efficient infrastructure, optimizing cooling systems, using efficient power distribution, and employing different techniques to reduce energy consumption and waste.

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Inside of a data center

What are the main components of a data center?

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Over time, the usage of data is increasing exponentially. For on-time availability of online data and applications, the number of data centers is also increasing. If you already have a basic idea of a data center, you may know a data center is a structure that houses an organization’s shared IT operations and equipment to store, process, and distribute data and applications. Data centers are important to the continuity of everyday operations since they store an organization’s most critical and proprietary assets.

The requirements and architectures of a data center can differ considerably. For example, a data center built for a government facility may store classified data for a dedicated purpose. Whereas commercial data center facilities built by cloud service providers like Google and Amazon can store data and provide cloud service and maintain different levels of security, infrastructures, power backup systems, and so on. Therefore, the components of the data centers can vary significantly based on the purpose, size, and tier of the data centers. Regardless of the purpose, size, and data center tiers classification, the design of data centers needs to be optimized by investments for the facility and the equipment it consists of.

Here is the list of the core components with a brief description of a data center:

1. Overall Facility – The overall facility consists of the usable space available for IT equipment, support infrastructure, heating system, cooling system, power supply system, round-the-clock monitoring system, security system, and administrative systems. In addition, there may have space for the storage area of emergency consumables such as power cables, network cables, etc. As the data centers are one of the most power density facilities, therefore, the optimization of the power consumption and space, including data center space is a vital issue during the design of the overall facility.

2. IT components – The IT components of data centers consist of computing hardware, racks, storage systems, servers, networking systems, routers, switches, and various security elements, such as firewalls. In addition, data centers also consist of security surveillance systems, and data center operation and monitoring systems.

3. Support infrastructure – The typical uptime of four tiers data centers ranging from 99.671% to 99.995% is defined by the Uptime Institute. Therefore, the support infrastructure of the data centers needs to ensure the highest possible availability. for equipment contributing to securely sustaining the highest availability possible. Some components for supporting infrastructure include:

  • Environmental control – To control the temperature, humidity, and airflow in the data center there consists of a computer room air conditioner (CRAC) unit, computer room air handling (CRAH) unit, and exhaust systems.
  • Uninterruptible Power Sources (UPS) – To maintain the uninterruptible power in the facility there consist of battery banks, backup diesel generators, and redundant power sources.
    • Physical security systems – For the physical security of the data centers there consist of video surveillance systems, and biometric authentication systems.

4. Operations & Maintenance Team – To maintain round-the-clock operation the data center also has data center operators, technicians, and network engineers to monitor operations and maintain IT and infrastructure equipment. It also works for incident management, front-line support for firefighting, administrative works, service works, etc.

These are the major components of data centers. However, there are also additional components that are also very important for the smooth operation of a data center. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to write them down.

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What is a data center?

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A data center is a structure that houses an organization’s shared IT operations and equipment in order to store, process, and distribute data and applications. Data centers are important to the continuity of everyday operations since they store an organization’s most critical and proprietary assets. As a result, data center security and reliability, as well as the information they contain, are among an organization’s top considerations.

Data centers used to be tightly managed physical infrastructures, but the public cloud has changed that. Most modern data center infrastructures have evolved from on-premises physical servers to virtualize infrastructure that supports applications and workloads across multi-cloud environments, with the exception of regulatory requirements that require an on-premises data center without internet connections.

The Function of Data Center
The data center is an important infrastructure of any organization, as they support corporate applications and provide services like:

  • Data storage, administration, backup, and recovery are all important aspects of data management.
  • Email and other productivity applications
  • E-commerce transactions with a high volume
  • Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data
  • Providing support for online gaming communities

According to several research and reports, there are more than 7 million data centers in the world now. Almost every company and government agency either creates and maintains its own data center or has access to another’s, if not both. Many choices are available today, including renting servers at a colocation facility, employing third-party data center services, or using public cloud-based services from Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Sony.

The Basic Components of Data Center IT systems
The structures and requirements of data centers might be somewhat different. A data center created for a cloud service provider like Amazon, for example, meets different facility, infrastructure, and security criteria than a wholly private data center, such as one built for a government facility dedicated to securing sensitive data. An effective data center operation, regardless of classification, is achieved through a balanced investment in the building and the equipment it houses. Furthermore, because data centers frequently store an organization’s business-critical data and applications, both the facilities and the equipment must be protected against intrusions and cyber attacks. Routers, switches, firewalls, storage systems, servers, and application delivery controllers are the empirical components of a data center design.

The following are the five major elements that must be present for a data center IT system to work properly:
a) Application: It’s a computer program that provides the reasoning for performing calculations.
b) Database management system (DBMS): A systematic method to store data in an orderly table that is interlinked to each other is provided by a database management system (DBMS).
c) Host or Compute: A computing platform that works with an application database.
d) Storage: A storage device is one that saves data consistency for later use.
e) Network: A data channel that improves communication between all of its networked devices.

Types of Data Center Facilities
The growth and classification of various different types of data center facilities have resulted from the expansion of data center infrastructure. Here are some types of data center facilities-
a) Enterprise Data Center Facilities: These are facilities that are conventionally organized and owned and controlled by a single company. These are usually on-site, and maintenance, IT deployments, hardware upgrades, and network monitoring are all overseen by an in-house team.
b) Colocation Data Centers: A colocation data center is a shared data center where an organization can rent space for servers and other hardware. The advantages of colocation over in-house data centers include that the facility provides the building, power, HVAC, internet bandwidth, and physical security, while you (the customer) are responsible for providing and maintaining the hardware.
c) Cloud Data Center — In recent years, this sort of data center construction has grown in popularity. A cloud data center is an off-premises facility that your firm may use over the internet, but you are not responsible for managing the equipment.
d) Managed Data Centers: A corporation rents the physical infrastructure while a third-party managed service provider oversees the hardware and facility in a managed service data center arrangement.

For more information, you can watch this video on Anixter youtube channel:

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