PTS Newsletter Archives – July, 2012

Now that we’re in the heat of the summer, we thought we’d provide alternatives to the need to upgrade, replace, and maintain your data center cooling assets. This month our newsletter focuses upon colocations and whether you should consider their potential impact on your business. Whether you have run out of room in your current facility, are looking for a backup site, or just want to know the long term benefits of a hosted data center facility, PTS can provide a great deal of information.

In addition to strategic colocation services, other topics include:

• Solutions Showcase: Quorum Backup & Disaster Recovery solutions.

• Educational White Papers: New white papers, interesting articles, and case studies are highlighted in our education section and available in the PTS Media Library.

As always, please think of us for your next data center project — whether it is infrastructure, facility, or IT related.

 Pete Sacco

President & Founder

PTS Data Center Solutions, Inc

Experts For Your Always Available Data Center

1. Reliability. Have you checked your tier rating lately? The Uptime Institute’s tier rating system provides higher ratings for facilities which have several levels of redundancy for power, cooling, etc. The costs are significant for a company to build many levels of redundancy throughout its data center or computer room (i.e. design costs, procurement of equipment and services, management costs).
2. Flexibility. Are your typical power requirements at 2.5 KW per rack? Needing a facility capable of supporting blade servers with 10 KW per rack requirements? Consider a colocation specializing in high per rack power requirements. They’ll also have the appropriate cooling systems in place.
3. Speed to Deploy. Did management forget to tell you early about a new acquisition and the need to add disparate IT solutions in your data center? Colocation providers typically have ample availability, ready for IT build-outs, at a moment’s notice. Sure, you won’t be in tomorrow, but a few weeks will do.
4. Security. There’s a cost of doing business for colocations in terms of physical and network security. Services include providing protection from theft and fire, but also may include well conceived network security designs. And, if needed, you can look for a facility with 7×24 security.
5. Facility Size. Tired of the endless guessing games related to sizing a facility? Colocations can actually save an organization money because it doesn’t have to over-size power, space, and cooling in the facility.  
6. Maintenance. Too many assets to maintain between servers, storage, UPS, cooling, switching, etc.? Think of the time you would save not having to worry about supporting infrastructure and being able to concentrate on keeping the IT infrastructure up-to-date.
7. Capital Budgetary Constraints. Waiting for your CAPEX budget to be released? What if you can forget about the capital to expand or build a new facility? Colocation monthly fees fall into the operating expense or OPEX category.
8. Network Management & Monitoring. Is your facility manned 7×24? Many colocation facilities have around-the-clock network operations personnel ready and waiting for a failure. Sure beats yanking the IT manager out of bed.
9. WAN Connectivity. What happens when the network goes down? Colocation providers have facilities from more than one network services provider and, because of the volume of services, can provide truly separate infrastructures.
10. Offsite Backup & Disaster Recovery. Still taking tapes offsite? Worried about the financial impact of a data center down condition? How about the peace of mind knowing you stored your critical data offsite at a colocation specializing in backup and disaster recovery?

All these reasons should be considered when looking at colocation or, for that matter, cloud services. If you are looking for expert advice and analysis relevant to your particular scenario, consider PTS’ Data Center Facility Business Strategy Consulting Services. The service analyzes your situation, evaluates potential risks, hidden costs, and other items which can affect making the right decision.

The appliance is placed next to your server infrastructure and tracks all physical and virtual machines within Quorum’s Recovery Nodes. When a fault is detected, a single click allows the onQ™ appliance to run the application on its recovery node.

By locating a second appliance at another site (your site or a colocation facility), you can create a full disaster recovery structure in case your production facility is unavailable for any reason. More cost effective than solutions such as SAN replication, Quorum has deployed its onQ Appliance, onQ Archive Vault, and Hybrid Cloud solutions to many facilities with minimal downtime requirements. Sectors deploying these solutions include healthcare, finance, and banking to name just a few.

Learn more about the Quorum Solutions

Read the Full Press Release

Contact PTS

Check out the latest white papers added to our website by signing in or joining our new PTS Media Library! We’re sure there will be some interesting content for your reading pleasure. For up-to-the-minute educational information don’t forget to check out the PTS Blog – Data Center Design, consider joining the LinkedIn Computer Room Design Group, or visit our Data Center Design Channel on YouTube.

The Distributed Enterprise: Remote Access and Management of IT Infrastructure by Raritan

While the proliferation of branch and remote offices is a positive sign of company growth, it can be a challenge for IT staffers. Besides managing data centers, IT teams take on the additional responsibility of managing and repairing branch office assets like routers, switches, firewalls, WAN optimizers, and servers. This paper addresses the added value of out-of-band access and control tools for branch offices. Download

Data Center Knowledge Guide to DCIM by No Limits Software

Today’s data centers are more complex, more interdependent and more critical than ever before. This has led to the need for more intelligent and automated IT infrastructure management. The tools which enable the data center team to effectively… Download

IT Recovery Plan White Paper by Quorum

Regular tests of your IT disaster recovery plan can mean the difference between a temporary inconvenience or going out of business. This white paper provide recommendations to develop an IT Recover Plan. Download

Press Release, July 10, 2012

PTS Data Center Solutions announced today it has been accepted as a Strategic Reseller Partner by Quorum®. The announcement comes as Quorum continues to build momentum in delivering its appliance and hybrid cloud backup, recovery and continuity solutions.

Read the Full PTS Press Release

Best of the Data Center Blogs

Data Center Knowledge, July 5th

PTS was acknowledged by Data Center Knowledge as having one of the more interesting blog posts recently.

Read the Full Article
Read the Blog Post

Read All PTS ‘In the News’ Activities Here

Founded in 1998, PTS Data Center Solutions is a premier data center design firm and turnkey solutions provider, offering a broad range of project experience, specializing in designing data centers, computer rooms and technical spaces that integrate “best-of-breed”, critical infrastructure technologies and result in continuously available, scalable, redundant, fault-tolerant, manageable, and maintainable mission critical environments.