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How Do You Evaluate a Data Center?

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the check-for-major-fault-lines dept.

mpapet writes to ask about the ins and outs of datacenter evaluation. Beyond the simpler questions of physical access control, connectivity, and power redundancy/capacity and SLA review, what other questions are important to ask when evaluating a data center? What data centers have people been happy with? What horror stories have people lived through with those that didn't make the cut?

3 of 211 comments (clear)

  1. Just off the top of my head by Critical+Facilities · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Beyond the simpler questions of physical access control, connectivity, and power redundancy/capacity and SLA review

    Well first of all, I don't know that I'd write any of those things off as "simple". But some other points worth looking into would be:

    1. Raised Floor Height
      Cable Management (over or under floor)
      Cooling Capacity and Redundancy
      Power Quality (not just redundancy)
      Age and Condition of Electrical Hardware (ATSs, STSs, UPSs, Generators)
      Outage/Uptime History
      Fire Suppression System and Smoke Detection System
      Maintenance records
      Maintenance records
      Maintenance records
  2. Word of mouth by tomhudson · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Find someone you trust who's already a customer. Word of mouth beats any number of white papers or studies or guarantees.

  3. What are you evaluating? by chris.knowles · · Score: 4, Insightful

    There are basically 3 perspectives from which to evaluate the Datacenter. They're pretty well universal to any IT eval. People, Process and Technology. The datacenter facility itself is only one piece of the puzzle (Facility = Technology, which only accounts for a fraction of the total cost of operating a Datacenter). There are also the people running the datacenter and how they are organized and interact with the technology, one another, and their customers (internal and external). From a people/process standpoint, if you want to give a general "score" to them, you can assess them against the SLM maturity scale. (Read about the Gartner Maturity Model for Infrastructure and Operations) Evaluating a datacenter is going to be a balance between the cost of operating the datacenter and the level of service you require from said datacenter. There really isn't enough information in the question to give you a good answer. Are you looking at evaluating the acquisition of a datacenter to grow into, are you looking for a managed services DC to host your gear with operational support? Are you looking for rack space with pipe and power? If you give more details to your inquiry, I'm sure the community can provide you with some great answers.