DCA REVIEW Resilience & Operational Best Practice
After the coffee break, Simon Campbell- Whyte Executive Director of the DCA presented an overview of the mechanics of DCA Certifications. He thanked DCA members for contributing and especially PTS Consulting, Future-Tech, CS Technology and Cerios Green for their expertise and assistance in developing the programme. Simon showed how the DCA Certifications is designed to be industry led, meeting the demands of fast evolving technology and innovation.
Customers of data centre will be able to trust the DCA Certification as a “quality mark” on their data centre facilities because it means the facility has been assessed by an approved auditor and that their findings have then been independently reviewed by an external DCA Accreditation Board. The benefit to operators of having their data
centre facilities DCA certified is to clearly demonstrate that the published data on the specific facility has been externally verified. This verification covers the four critical areas demanded of data centres which is Reliability, Operational professionalism, Physical Security and Energy Efficiency.
Simon outlined the benefits to the industry’s consumers by assuring them that a data centre ‘does exactly what it says on the tin’, safe in the knowledge that the facility is reviewed annually to ensure that the advertised standards are maintained. Simon also showed the critical “golden rules” of the scheme to ensure it is trusted which include; Independence, transparency and affordability.
After Simon’s presentation debating continued into a panel session, chaired by
Lord Redesdale
Matt Pumfrey, which included on the panel Martin Essig, MD of Telecity GmbH, James Wilman of Future Tech, Steve Hone of DCA, Grant Morrison of PTS Consulting and Frank Verhagen of Cerios Green. The DCA would like to thank all the speakers and participants who contributed to a stimulating and inspiring afternoon.
Do you really have Resilient Cooling? By David King, Senior Consultant Engineer, Future Facilities Ltd.
RESILIENCE AND REDUNDANCY are often treated synonymously, but they are not the same thing. While the dictionary tells us that resilience refers to something’s toughness, it informs us that redundancy refers to an object’s expendability. To the engineer it means this: a system with redundancy built in is not necessarily a resilient one.
In the data center, being resilient means that all of the IT equipment housed in the facility will continue to function in the face of a power outage, cooling failure or other serious disruption. That is, to have a system such that any element can fail and there is another with enough spare capacity to ensure resilience.
Consider a data center with a 2N redundant power system. There are separate, expendable paths for electricity to flow, all the way from the incoming utility to the individual rack, and each is capable of supporting the full load.
However, the IT equipment will only be resilient to a power failure if it is plugged in to both of those of power paths. Even if the servers have two power cords, if they are
Fig 1. Airflow under normal operations
both plugged in to the same power strip, all of that redundancy is wasted and the IT is not resilient. For it to be resilient, the redundancy has to be transferred all the way down the chain to the IT without a single point of failure.
For a power system, or even a network system, the resilience of the IT can be checked relatively easily; both of these services are delivered by wired connections all the way from the utility entry down to the IT. Diagrams of how these connections
Summer 2014 I
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