Choosing An Optimal Site For Your Data Centre

When the time comes for your business to consider a data centre, how do you choose the optimal site? Obviously, you will want to avoid any potential hazards, but there will be some specific physical attributes you will want to look for.

An ideal data centre should include qualities that allow protection from potential hazards, easy accessibility and should be able to accommodate future growth and change.


Data Centre Zoning

When evaluating a property's suitability for use as a data centre, you will need to verify the property's zoning. Some zoning classifications prohibit a data centre as part of the property's usage. You can request information regarding a property's zoning from the local municipality, council area, or shire in whose jurisdiction the property falls.

If for some reason the property you want is zoned as unacceptable for use as a data centre, then you can apply to have the property rezoned.

Data Centre Site Risks - Natural Hazards

Knowing what potential hazards may affect the property in which you plan to house a data centre can be a huge consideration. Choosing a data centre site in an earthquake-prone location, hurricane-prone locality or in a flood plain will mean making some specific choices about your construction plans.

Another hazard you might want to consider while you are still in the planning stages of your data centre is fire. Factor in the cost or fire-resistant walls and doors. Include smoke detection devices and fire suppression systems. You may also consider including adjustable dampers on ventilation and air conditioning systems so that you can manually prevent air from outside the server environment from entering.

These known hazards will affect your decision about your data centre's design and you should alter your design accordingly to prepare and protect against them.

Data Centre Site Risks - Man-Made Hazards

Choosing a site that is in close proximity to an electrical tower means your data centre may experience significant electromagnetic interference, which can seriously affect a server environment.

Perhaps the area in which you have selected for your data centre is prone to ice storms, which bring about extended periods of power-outages. The need to incorporate a standby power generator will factor highly in your data centre infrastructure.

Pollution and airborne contaminants, like dust, pesticides, or industrial by-products can cause server components to short-circuit or overheat. You should consider including a method of protecting your equipment by controlling the amount of outside air that is cycled into the server room.

Data Centre Accessibility

Once you have assessed the potential risks and hazards of a site for your data centre and you have decided to go ahead with plans, you will need to fully evaluate the physical attributes of the site too.

Easy accessibility to the data centre is a factor that needs to be taken into consideration, along with where the site is in relation to the company's other server environments. When assessing accessibility to the site, look at details such as being visible from a major roadway or multiple routes to reach the property.

You will also need to be sure your data centre is located near large population centres. This can influence how close your employees live to the data centre, but it can also dictate how long it may take an employee to reach the property in the event of an afterhour's emergency.

By: Derek Rogers

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Derek Rogers is a freelance writer who writes for a number of UK businesses. For Data Centre design, he recommends Network 24, a leading data centre design company.

Green Servers: Environmentally Friendly Network Solutions

If you are someone who is in charge of the hardware solutions that your company uses, you will find that it is quite important to consider what you need to do to make your office more green-friendly. There are a number of different ways that you can integrate environmentally appropriate solutions in your office, and some of them might be a great deal more hardware oriented than you might think. With the energy crisis coming to a head and more and more businesses seeing the result, you'll find that there is a great deal that you can do to reduce your energy output as well as your financial overhead. Take some time and really consider what your options are and what green solutions can do for you.

In the first place, you will find that unless you are taking some fairly rigorous measures, you are overspending on electricity. Your data centre is a place that is positively bleeding cash, often in the realm of thousands of '£s' every single month, and the sole culprit can be inefficient power equipment. When you are looking into making your data centres more efficient, you'll discover that you need to take a look at the uninterruptible power supplies that lead to your servers. These devices, also known as UPS, are designed in such a way as to keep the servers running and to guard against grid failure. They are vital, but there is a good chance they are operating less than 75% energy efficiency.

The result, when you are looking to make sure that your office is saving money and is acting in a more eco-friendly environment, is that you are going to need to think about what you can do to get your old UPS hardware replaced with smaller, modular units. This can reduce the cost of your energy bill by more than 20% every hour. This can make a huge difference in the amount of energy that is wasted and the amount of money that you save.

You should also think about what your options are going to be when you are thinking about cooling your equipment. Most organizations will merely have traditional floor-based cooling, which will be quite indiscriminate as to the amount of energy contained. When you are looking to eliminate this waste, switching to in-row chillers that focus their effect on very specific heat sources can be a key way to move forward with making your servers and your server room more green compliant. Other solutions do involve making the most out of your existing hardware through the use of server virtualization software.

Similarly, you will find that even the servers that you use themselves can be made more energy efficient. Large name companies like Dell are currently rolling out servers that are designed to be energy conservative. In Dell's case, their PowerEdge Energy Smart models tend to host a processor that draws on only 40 watts of power versus the more standard 65 or even 80, and more generally, there is a claimed 25% improvement.

Consider where the energy issues of today leave you and your company. Don't get left behind, check out the green servers that can do so much for you!

By: Derek Rogers

Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com

Derek Rogers is a freelance writer who writes for a number of UK businesses. For information on Network hardware, he recommends Prodec Networks, a leading Network Consultancy.

Why Do I Have Such A Slow Internet Speed?

It doesn’t matter what kind of Internet you have, cable, DSL, dial-up, or even fiber-optic. There are going to be times when your Internet speed will be so slow it’s laughable. My job is to show you what sort of things usually go wrong, and to teach you what you can do to correct them and get the highest speed possible out of your Internet connection.

The first thing you should obviously look at is the type of Internet connection that you have. The most common types are Dial-up, DSL, and Cable, increasing in speed respectively. If you use dial-up, there are two ways to make sure you’re getting the most out of your connection. Make sure that you have a 56k modem installed. This means that your modem will send and receive info at a rate of 56 kilobits per second, or Kbps. You usually won’t get the full 56k, but most of the time you will reach somewhere between 45-50 Kbps. The second thing you should do is check to make sure that your phone line is in good condition. If it is old and deteriorating, then you will most likely pick up stray signals and cross talk from other lines, which will slow your Internet speed because the modem must resend the information again and again until it can go through uninterrupted.

If you’re trying to connect wirelessly, there are two major factors that play a role on the speed. The first is proximity. The farther away from the hub, or signal, you are the slower your Internet becomes, so make sure you don’t stray too far away! Secondly, if there are a lot of people using the same wireless internet, that will also reduce your speed because the modem can only take so much.

The two most common reasons for slow Internet speed are caused by spyware, and viruses. Spyware are little bits of programming that can monitor where you go on the internet, as well as record your keystrokes thereby stealing valuable information like passwords to bank accounts. Spyware can also slow your Internet speed by messing with the Internet browser and taking control over your Internet connection. This problem is increased exponentially when there are several spyware programs running at the same time, which can cause you to lose your connection completely. The best thing that you can do to combat this threat is to run an anti-spyware program at least once a week.

The common computer virus is also a concern when it comes to slow Internet speed. Viruses are programs that can hide in anything, and if they get a hold of your computer, can replicate themselves hundreds of times over, and send copies of itself through the email system. They can do this hundreds of times per minute, which drastically reduces your computing and Internet speed. The worst part about a virus is that it will do all of this, and you won’t even know it’s running. So to prevent this from happening, make sure to run a anti-virus software along with your anti-spyware software at least once a week.

By: The Computer Pro

Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com

Ian Orzel is the owner and operator of The Computer Pro based in Detroit, MI. Ian's goal is obviously to fix home and small business computers, but more importantly to teach people how to fix these problems themselves so that in the future they can save money on computer repair. If interested in the services provided, or to sign up for the newsletter please go to www.computerpro1.net