January 31, 2005—Poorly managed cabling is the most common problem found in today’s IT facilities, according to Infrastructure Development Corporation (IDC-MCS)’s first annual analysis of Top Data Center Dangers. The IT consultancy is urging companies to closely examine their essential physical infrastructure to ensure data centers, and other mission critical facilities, are as safe and efficient as possible.
Mission-critical facilities need to be actively managed by enforcing that all IT support systems are correctly installed, maintained and operated. As data centers age or as equipment density increases, it is not uncommon to find supporting infrastructure, such as power distribution, HVAC, Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) and cable management systems, becoming overburdened or stressed to the point of failure.
From conducting numerous site assessments over the past 12 months, IDC-MCS identified the following as the Top Data Center Dangers of 2004:
- Lack of well managed cabling—in some older data centers, new cable is deployed without removing older cable bundles.
- Confusion about UPS technologies
- Contaminated slab or sub-floor—if the plenum beneath a raised floor is not cleaned on a regular basis, galvanic ‘grey whiskers’ can propagate and contaminate data center air.
- Lack of fire suppression systems—often fire suppression systems are taken out of service due to maintenance costs or operational difficulties.
- Over heated data centers—Often dated facilities are designed for mainframe equipment and not intended to be used for high density PC-based or blade server technology.
- Poor electrical grounding techniques—Keeping grounding grid resistance to a minimum in accordance with sound engineering principals can prevent almost all Transient Voltage Surges (TVS).
- Poorly maintained standby generator sets (gensets) and Automatic Transfer Switches (ATS)—Typical maintenance procedures are simple and inexpensive, including items such as regular oil changes, filter replacements, hose and belt replacements and test running the generator at least one hour per week.
- Power distribution systems—Some examples include absence of Emergency Power Off (EPO) switches, whips not securely fastened to the deck or equipment added without recalculating total rack amperage requirements resulting in overloaded circuits.
- Raised floor systems—air bleeding through poorly sealed flooring can result in the loss of up to 25% of the pressure created to cool equipment cabinets.
- Data center management—All too often failures are attributable to the ‘human factor’. This is a result of poor training or enforcement of operations protocols.
“From IDC-MCS’ experience assessing many IT facilities, we find many enterprises fail to pay close attention to their data center’s physical infrastructure, updating them at most once every five years,” said Steve Ritzi, Director of Marketing at IDC-MCS, Inc. “This leaves their IT infrastructure in serious danger of exceeding temperature specifications or failing to meet cabling and power supply requirements. Infrastructure Development Corporation advises companies to spend the extra time and allocate sufficient budget to better manage server rooms in order to avoid the potential of equipment failures and data loss down the line.”
For more information, contact IDC-MCS.
