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Data Center Site Selection
Centralized data centers have helped many enterprises achieve substantial productivity gains and cost savings. These data centers house mission-critical applications, which must be highly available. The demand on data centers is therefore higher than ever before. Data center design must focus on scalability, flexibility and achieving high availability. A disaster in a single data center that houses enterprise applications and data has a crippling affect on the ability of an enterprise to conduct business. Enterprises must be able to survive any natural and man-made disasters that may affect the data center. Enterprises can achieve application scalability, high availability, and redundancy by deploying distributed data centers.
Business Goals and Requirements
It is important to keep in mind why organizations use data centers and why site selection is the first step in achieving high availability.
Technology allows businesses to be productive and to react quickly to business environment changes. Data centers protect that technology and are therefore, one of the most important business assets.
The Problem
If a data center becomes unavailable, substantial direct and indirect losses may occur. Direct losses translate into extra costs and lost revenue. Indirect losses, however, are much harder to quantify. Indirect losses may include the costs related to legal, contractual, and regulatory obligations, and customer satisfaction issues due to not meeting service level agreements.
Gartner Group Dataquest estimates that two out of five companies that experience a disaster go out of business within five years. Many organizations, such as hospitals, credit card companies and financial institutions, after realizing the productivity gains that the network brings to their businesses, are moving towards always-available infrastructures.
According to a report published by Strategic Research Corporation, the financial impact of a major system outage is enormous:
- US $6.5 million per hour in the case of a brokerage operation
- US $2.6 million per hour for a credit-card sales authorization system
- US $14,500 per hour in automated teller machine (ATM) fees if an ATM system is offline
According to a research report from META Group, the average cost estimate for an hour of downtime is $330,000. Another consulting firm puts the figure closer to $1 million. Even planned application downtime causes some disruption to businesses. Deploying multiple data centers is a key method for solving downtime problems.
Site Selection Services
PTS considers six (6) major areas as part of the site selection process and provide two (2) distinct site selection services:
- Assistance in selecting an appropriate geography on which to locate a data center.
- Evaluation of a previously identified building site.
Natural Hazard Threats
- Including proximity to floods hazard areas, waterways, earthquake zones, etc.
Physical Location Threats
- Including multi-tenant occupancy, separation of parking areas & loading docks from perimeter walls.
Terrorist Activity Threats
- Proximity to high exposure targets.
Environmental Contamination Threats
- Proximity to hazardous materials manufacturing and storage.
Site Accessibility
- Proximity to major traffic arteries and airports.
Amenities Access
- Proximity to major metropolitan areas.
To shorten significantly our clients' time, and cost, investment for site search, PTS has access to databases of data center properties in the U.S.
It is vital that a data center provide always-available access for both customers and employees. The goal is guaranteed accessibility to data - anywhere - anytime. Since it is impossible to meet the requirement with a single data center, many of our clients seek to build a second data center as part of their disaster recovery and business continuity plans.
Apart from overcoming this single point of failure, multiple data centers provide additional benefits, such as application scalability, high availability, and load distribution.
Save Money, Save Time - Choose a Site Wisely
PTS's, data center, site selection services are the optimal way to ensure your mission critical facility is located in both, a location and a building, that can support constant availability. Choosing a site that minimizes the natural and man made threats to continuous operation is the first step in provisioning a new data center. PTS can help you save time and money by providing risk analysis guidance for any physical geography and availability analysis guidance for any facility.
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