How To Choose A Datacenter
 By Scott Whitney
In 2005, notebook computers accounted for 50.1% of all computer sales.
In 2006, shelf space for notebooks increased 44%, while desktop shelf space (and sales) went down by 23%. What does this have to do with a datacenter? Everything.
At Journyx, where I manage IT, we presently have about 25 employees. Of those, 11 have laptops issued to them as their primary machine. One employee works remotely in another state. Therefore, half of our employees need constant remote access to our business. Well, it's possible they don't need it, but they sure do whine about it an awful lot when they don't have it. So for me, in my little fiefdom known as "IT," that pretty much amounts to the same thing.
As with most companies, we store the bulk of our data internally on our network here at the corporate headquarters, but we also store a fair bit of it at our datacenter. We have software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications which we host for our customers, as well as for ourselves. We have our web site, of course, which must be up and running 24x7 or my CEO calls me up in a panic. We have an FTP server for support, as well as one for the public, etc. You get the picture. We've got resources that are needed by our remote employees as well as our customers. In essence, we need a reliable 24x7, redundant, fast way for our people and the world to access our data. If this sounds familiar to you, you might be in the same boat that we were in. We needed a datacenter.
I'm oversimplifying our needs a bit, since we are a hosted service provider for literally hundreds of organizations around the world. You see, with the software that Journyx creates, you can either host it locally on one of your own servers, or you can ask us to do it for you, taking away that overhead. Since we host our customers' data in addition to our own, in different time zones around the world, I was in the joyful, enviable position of evaluating datacenters (again). It was either that or get a root canal, and that was the excuse I used last time, so I decided to man up and take on the challenge.
I say "again" because my previous datacenter experience was a true fiasco. You see, this company-we'll call them "Evil" -had bought up my existing provider and, in an effort to either cause the 100 or so customers significant pain for no reason whatsoever or to cut costs without evaluating the actual opportunity cost of the move, they decided to close the facility in which we were housed and move us across town to their "better" datacenter. Well, Evil and Evil's Minions had no idea how to run a datacenter. Without going much into their inexperience, let's just say that we knew we needed to move when at 5:30 p.m. on a Friday, one of the Minions shut down all physical and logical access into and out of the datacenter because several of the collocated customers had a virus. We were unable to get back up and running until Monday morning. This was one indication that perhaps there were better choices available to us out there in the world.
Vowing to myself, in my best Roger Daltrey voice, that I wouldn't get fooled again, I put on my Due Diligence Hat (my boss makes me wear it from time to time to avoid situations like the above) and sat down to determine how to choose a datacenter.
Following are the major points which you absolutely cannot ignore if you hope to be successful. I wish I had this article when I was going about my business. Here, I hope to provide, in no particular order, a definitive list of investigation points that should lead you to the best collocation provider for your needs in your area.
1) Halt! Who goes there?
With the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, a lot of attention became focused on fraud and fraud prevention. Part of this particular Enron-created hell is the wonderful and invigorating SAS70 audit which, in the simplest terms, is a proctologic exam where the external auditors and your internal management pokes and prods and searches around until they can pull sufficient controls out to ensure that customer data is kept relatively safe. |
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