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10 mistakes you might be making with your data center

Sorry, most of the above are the bleeding obvious, and if you make them, you are obviously in the wrong job.

It is surprising how easy it is to miss 'The Bleeding Obvious'. Perhaps the fact that a hazard is familiar makes us less wary than is prudent.

I agree that most of these are blindingly obvious, and may perhaps be to educate someone with little knowledge of how a proper data center works about what is what?

There are some businesses who have what I would call a 'pseudo data center' that is some cobbled-together office space with a strong lock on the door. I would think perhaps that would apply to them.

11th. Poorly designed network infrastructure
12th. Network Security Issues

Although events like Hurricane Sandy are rare, adequate disaster preparedness can help minimize the impact of such events. Backup generators can't do their job when they're under water, nor, for that matter, can a data center function under such conditions. Natural disasters such as flooding, tornadoes, earthquakes, and volcanoes can render even the most robustly-built data center useless. Have a separately-located failover site.

Another issue I would love to add is a proper shutdown procedure.

In today datacenter enviroments, is pretty common to have a mix of routers, firewalls, NAS, SAN, Vmware servers, backup servers, tape drives, email servers, database servers, UPS's, switches, Intrusion detection devices, Proxies, WAN accelerators, etc.

Some small datacenters can have all this equipment but lack of power generation equipment. In a case of extended power failure, power maintenance and other issues where you will have no power for several hours (or days) in the datacenter, You will need to shutdown all your equipment in the correct order and with the right procedure.

For example

1- never shutdown your domain controllers before shutdown Exchange first,
2- make full backup (if this is an scheduled power down) of all servers
3- turn off servers in the right order: for example if you have a Blackberry server (BES), turn it off before Exchange
4- turn off SAN devices at the end of the servers turn off routine
5- have proper docummentation of the power off routines for special devices like SAN, virtual disks and other devices in use by Virtual infrastructure (you definiitely do not want to turn off the SAN where the ESX servers have the data)
6- have docummentation of all ip addresses, login and passwords,
7- have a copy of the clients you will need to power on / power off your units (ie: vmware clients, san clients, etc)
8- consider to have a laptop with extended battery time in your site or office
9- list of all IT contacts, providers, etc
10- notify users about power disruption, in maintenances or emergencies
11- some ISP can cut your E1 links if your device are turned off fore some x time. I normally turn off all equipment but I have a big UPS able to provide enough juice to the router for about 8 days. In this way I avoid our ISP to cut our ring and have problems when power is back

Hope this works for you

is a bad thing?

I think perhaps what you are hinting at is actually TESTING your DR or BCP scenario. Lots of the things you mention sound like something learned the hard way.

It's much better to test all these things on a sunny Saturday versus when you're knee deep in flood water.

Just wanted to relay my own experience, don't mean to stir up any love-hate discussions about AWS. I support IT infrastructures for small businesses and have been working the numbers with every new deployment. Anymore, the cost of doing it on your own with your own hardware and physical location is by far higher than building it on AWS. I run most of my servers in spot instance and even in a month like last month that was expensive for spot instances, the monthly running cost was still below cost of reserved instances. When you total running, storage and IOs cost for a three year span you will come up with less of what you would have spent on your own data center. And all that is paid in monthly payments for resources used as opposed to lump sum purchase or worse, interest bearing payments for your own physical infrastructure. If you can get away with placing your infrastructure a WAN link away from your physical location then don't be wasting your time and money with building your own data center. AWS had a bad outage last month and of course it pissed me off but I stick with them because their prices are unbeatable and their services are constantly improving with new ones coming out every year. I did not mean to make this sounds like an AWS infomartial, just to relay my own experience and considerations with regard to the topic this article covered.

Based on my recent experience with Managed Hosting (private Cloud provided by Third Party)
is alway expensive compared to maintain own DataCenter.The only advantage you get is moving away from overheads like realestate,power and upgrade cost.
You should not look at cloud for Cost saving unless you have applications with less duty cycles (server transations happens once in day or occasionally). You will pay only for actual power usagae and server utilisation.