RACKS AND ENCLOSURES
What makes a humble rack or cabinet Tier 4? Tier 4 By Matthew Goulding, Managing Director, Cannon Technologies
Introduction You’d be forgiven for thinking that an inanimate steel wardrobe to contain your equipment would not have an effect on the reliability of your data centre. But you’d be very wrong. The whole concept of a tier 4 facility is resilience and redundancy and this is one of the key elements when deciding if a data cabinet is tier 4. So what elements make a resilient cabinet?
Matthew Goulding explains what you need to specify to pass the accreditation process.
Power Power is a good place to start when designing your cabinets. A fully redundant data centre will always have two different power feeds from alternative sources. Internally they are then split into A and B circuits. A redundant cabinet should have a feed from each of the power circuits. Each of those feeds goes into its own UPS and from there into a PDU. Power to the equipment in the rack should come from each of the PDUs. One of the difficulties for customers
is that unless they own the data centre, it can be difficult to get this level of redundancy. However, they need to insist on it if they want their cabinets to be resilient.
Cooling It is frequently common to see the air conditioning running off of its own power circuit. One of the dangers of this is that there is little redundancy in how the air conditioning and cooling is provided. In exactly the same way as both A and B power are provided to the racks, the same should be true when powering the air conditioning and cooling systems. It is also important to have a
secondary cooling system should the primary fail or have enough spare capacity in the data centre so that critical workloads can be moved to areas where there is still sufficient cooling capacity.
In Rack Equipment As well as the power, it is critical that the equipment in the rack is also redundant to prevent any single point of failure.
14 NETCOMMS europe Volume III Issue 3 2013
However, this is not always possible due to cost constraints but there are choices that customers can make that will increase the resilience. Hardware in the rack should be
provisioned with multiple network ports. These ports should then be mapped to multiple network switches at the top of the rack. This provides resilience at several layers. It provides support for the failure of a switch, the accidental disconnection of a cable and load
balancing should any network segment become overloaded. When considering the switches
ensure that redundancy is provided for both copper and fibre circuits. This is not only about the inter-server connectivity but also the connection to the Internet or leased lines. All carriers coming into a data centre will choose a route that is separate from other carriers. In inner city areas, it is important to check that there are no points outside
Tier 4 data centres can cost tens of millions.
www.netcommseurope.com
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