Data Centers and Networking

Jeta Gjana Mart Doyle MIS 2501 2/1/11 Data Centers and Networking

Last year, we have noticed 10 unscheduled outages to the ERP system. Such outages have impacted our organization by lowering the income statement because our expenses have increased. Our company needs to invest in a datacenter that will not allow outages to occur. We need to switch from Tier I into a Tier III data center. This will make our company more efficient and profitable by providing a 99.982% availability and sustaining 72-hour power outage.

In order to see our company become efficient and gain profits, we need to build the Tier III data center. It provides “99.982% availability [whereas Tier I] provides 99.671% availability,” (Ewin, 1997-2001). This percentage shows that Tier III is more competent than the current tier. The increase of 0.311% availability will save $24,153,600 per year.

Many companies have adopted Tier III, such as automobile manufacturers, health insurance companies, et cetera, (Also shown in Table 1). Tier III has a world-wide presence. Its majority of revenue comes from online businesses. It has a VoIP phone system with high dependence on IT. Tier III is a highly recognized brand with a high cost of downtime. Some of the major effects on system design include two utility paths (active and passive), redundant power and cooling systems, redundant service providers, one- hour fire rating, and concurrent maintenance. Tier III “sustains 72-hour power outage [whereas] Tier I is unable to sustain more than 10 minute power outage,” (Avelar, 2007). This big difference will provide more efficiency for our company.

By investing in this datacenter, it will have sufficient redundancy in place to allow for planned maintenance without downtime (N+1 redundancy). Also, Tier III is required to have at least 13.2 Kilo Volts of power. The annual downtime is “1.6 hours [whereas Tier I] has an average of 28 hours of unplanned downtime per year,” (Cappuccio, 2010). A Tier III level capability allows for any planned site infrastructure activity without disrupting the computer hardware operation.

Tier III best suites our company because it will make our company more efficient and profitable. We will save $24,153,600 per year if we upgrade to Tier III. We have nothing to lose, but try and get our company ahead.

Gjana 1 Table 1: Typical levels of criticality for different applications (Avelar, 2007)

Gjana 2 Bibliography

Avelar, Victor. “Guidelines for Specifying Data Center Criticality/Tier Levels.” American Power Conversion. 2007, http://www.lamdahellix.com/%5CUserFiles%5CFile%5Cdownloads%5C122_whi tepaper.pdf

Cappuccio, David J. “What to Consider When Designing Next-Generation Data Centers.” Gartner. 10 Sep. 2010, http://my.gartner.com/portal/server.pt?open=512&objID=260&mode=2&PageID =3460702&resId=1434723&ref=QuickSearch&sthkw=%22Tier+3%22

Ewin, Josh. “Anatomy of a Datacenter.” Lock Media Services, Inc. 1997-2001, http://www.lockmedia.com/services/datacenter-anatomy-overview.asp

Turner, W. Pitt, John H. Seader, and Kenneth G. Brill. “Industry Standard Tier Classifications Define Site Infrastructure Performance.” The Uptime Institute, Inc. 2001-2005, http://www.dntp.com/news/pdfs/Data%20Center%20Tier_Classification.pdf

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