Best Practices for Data Center Cabling

Introduction
Today’s Datacenter house a large number of diverse bandwidth-intensive devices, including bladed servers, clustered storage systems, virtualization appliances, and backup devices-all interconnected by network infrastructure. These devices need physical cables with an higher performance factor .
There are considerations outside of the cable plant and number of connectors alone: usability, scalability, costs and the ability to perform Moves, Adds and Changes (MAC’s). Additionally, some limitations exist based on the category of the cabling system. Copper and fiber distances may vary with the type of cabling system selected. We will discuss some of those parameters
and their potential impact on data center designs.
This Document will take you, briefly though the process of effect planning of cabling in data center which includes:

• Understanding cabling requirements
• Planning cabling infrastructure
• Selecting cabling components
• Implementing and testing cabling
• Manage Cabling infrastructure

Key Factors to be considered for Data Cabling Design:
Planning is the key. You may involve in wiring and cabling for new datacenter or upgrade of existing one.

• Review Common Media Types: Before you start, please review common media types used in datacenter.
  There are chances that a new type supported by device since you did similar project last time. For example, you implemented in datacenter few years back with 1Gig backbone and now current project need 10Gig backbone and has servers with 10Gig NIC also switches support 10Gig connections.
• Document the Current: if you are upgrading an existing datacenter, document the topology and various types cables used and present. Also document proposed cable type, count, distance, area of concerns, and any established internal cabling.
• Plan to accommodate both copper and fiber: use copper and fiber as needed. Build flexibility, so that the patching structure will allow a device to connect to any other device in datacenter.
• Use structure approach: create a structure and implement the same. In this plan core-distribution, distribution-access or MDF-IDF topology and follow the same.
• Define naming convention: Define an easy to understand naming convention for all cabling. It should be in such a way that anyone can understand how is the physical connections.

For example :
10^th port on 5 Patch Panel on rack 2 of 3^rd row can be
PC325-10 [PC{row}{rack}{patch panel}- {port}]

• Document the cabling design: once cabling is done and servers are connected, it gets very difficult to trace cable connections. So it is always best to document and manage cabling design.

For Example :
Server1 is connected on server_farm_sw1 on 4/5 port
SS111-10>>SF124-5 ( this can have multiple level of cable connections but document it and if it is too complicated make a flow diagram for “how to document”

• Modular Data Cabling: Modular cabling systems for fiber and copper connectivity are gaining in popularity. Modular cabling introduces the concept of plug-and-play, simplifying the installation of cables and reduces time and cost. In this
  cables are normally pre-terminated and tested.
• Trust the standards: Industry cabling standards are designed to protect the end user. Weather these standards are in draft or ratified state, they provide a firm foundation for establishing a coherent infrastructure, and guidance.

There are a number of standards organization and standards. The three best known cabling standards organizations are listed below:
United States ANSI/TIA/EIA-568 from the Telecommunications Industry Association
International ISO/IEC IS 11801 (Generic Customer Premises Cabling)
International TIA-942 from the TIA

• Use Color to Identify Cables: Color provides quick visual identification. Color coding simplifies management and can save you hours when you need to trace cables. Color coding can be applied to ports on a patch panel.

Example color scheme for patch cables:

• General Media Standards: Following list contains standard media types widely used.

Application	Media	Classification	Max. Distance	Wavelength
10GBASE-T	Twisted Pair Copper	Category 6/Class E UTP	up to 55m*
10GBASE-T	Twisted Pair Copper	Category 6A/Class EA UTP	100m
10GBASE-T	Twisted Pair Copper	Category 6A/Class EA F/UTP	100m
10GBASE-T	Twisted Pair Copper	Class F/Class FA	100m
10GBASE-CX4	Manufactured	N/A	10-15m
10GBASE-SX	62.5 MMF	160/500	28m	850nm
10GBASE-SX	62.5 MMF	200/500	28m	850nm
10GBASE-SX	50 MMF	500/500	86m	850nm
10GBASE-SX	50 MMF	2000/500	300m	850nm
10GBASE-LX	SMF		10km	1310nm
10GBASE-EX	SMF		40km	1550nm
10GBASE-LRM	All MMF		220m	1300nm
10GBASE-LX4	All MMF		300m	1310nm
10GBASE-LX4	SMF		10km	1310nm

• Horizontal Cabling: Use horizontal patch panels to accommodate cables in racks and manage them neatly. Also Cables should be labeled and tie using ties or Velcro.
• Vertical Cable Manager: Cable manger is used to manage cables going across racks. Mostly vertical cable mangers are covered and give neat and clear view.
• Overhead Cable Trays: Use over head trays to manage cables. Define Power cables and network
  cables and don’t keep them in same area.
  As Diagram shows

1. Power Cables
2. Power Cable trays
3. Network Cable trays
4. Cable Manager in Rack

Conclusion
Data Center Cabling is one time project viable for lifetime of Data Center. Choose wisely and make is a master piece. If you design it right, it will definitely going to add to success of your data Center.



 

Data Center Real Estates

Introduction

Data Centers, the buildings housing corporate servers & backup facilities, are an emerging asset class that investors need to seriously consider for their investment portfolio. While the opportunities in the current real estate market are froth with tranche warfare, extend & pretend & trophy buildings at nosebleed valuations & the rest of the investment market is worrying about a double dip, data center growth has continued throughout the recession with demand doubling every 2 years. Many believe this is the one place where 20% returns are still possible.

The Data Center Real Estate term refers to consider expert management services that include administration, monitoring, and maintenance of your equipment in a secure Building. This is sole meant for your business benefits while building a new datacenter.

Key Factors to be considered for Data Center Real Estate:

Datacenter building is built to house business of organization and other clients. It is very vital to have detailed study about all aspects for choosing and building datacenter.

· Geographical Location: While making a choice where to build datacenter, it is required to have knowledge about the geographical analysis of the location. Snow storms, flood, fire, earth quakes, tsunamis, rains, tornado etc are some natural factors which can affect your business. You would not like to have your datacenter at a place where you have any on these now and then. In case, you are aware that any of these are potential factors, then its recommended to take counter measures.

· Political Stability: if possible, try to choose place which are politically stable and there are not seen war, terrorism, strikes, riots etc. These can again going to affect your business adversely.

· Real Estate property Cost: This factor is going to take considerable part of your budget while building a new datacenter. Real Estate cost in city or locality shall be taken in consideration and choose the best one.

· Local Taxes and policies: Local area taxes, rules and policies are going to affect you and your potential customers. Hence this should also be in your check list while making a decision.

· Availability of required resources: You need skilled and non-skilled resources for building and operating datacenter. Make sure area have that kind of resources available. Bringing resource from outside is another option but sometime it affects the budget.

· Architecture of building: while designing the building architecture, it should be considered to be secure, safe, green, heat resistant, have raised floors. Building should have protected zones and fire controls. Building should also have process access controls to avoid any loss to property. Position of building should be in such a way that it have optimized utilization of local resources. Building should be scalable to accommodate your future expansion plans.

· Power Feed etc: Power feed availability shall also be considered as it is going to keep Datacenter up and running. Also should have Power backup options like AC generators and UPS etc.

· Operations: Building should have proper staff to take care of facility. It should be kept neat and clean. All equipments should secure.

· Availability of Potential clients: In case the datacenter is built to provide services to external customers (as it is being done now days), it is essential to survey and market your products in target areas. Services served by these kinds of Datacenters are:

Collocation

Cloud Services

o SaaS

o PaaS

o IaaS etc

Managed Services etc

Conclusion

Like any other business, Datacenter Real estate is in business demands and now growing. Data Center is the place which keeps your business going so you need to consider all the factors before you start for the building datacenter and once you have it, it is needed to operate in best way to get return of investment (ROI).

Data Center Electrical Systems

Introduction

Data Centers, the buildings housing corporate servers & backup facilities, are an emerging asset class that investors need to seriously consider for their investment portfolio. While the opportunities in the current real estate market are froth with tranche warfare, extend & pretend & trophy buildings at nosebleed valuations & the rest of the investment market is worrying about a double dip, data center growth has continued throughout the recession with demand doubling every 2 years. Many believe this is the one place where 20% returns are still possible.

The Data Center Real Estate term refers to consider expert management services that include administration, monitoring, and maintenance of your equipment in a secure Building. This is sole meant for your business benefits while building a new datacenter.

Key Factors to be considered for Data Center Real Estate:

Datacenter building is built to house business of organization and other clients. It is very vital to have detailed study about all aspects for choosing and building datacenter.

· Geographical Location: While making a choice where to build datacenter, it is required to have knowledge about the geographical analysis of the location. Snow storms, flood, fire, earth quakes, tsunamis, rains, tornado etc are some natural factors which can affect your business. You would not like to have your datacenter at a place where you have any on these now and then. In case, you are aware that any of these are potential factors, then its recommended to take counter measures.

· Political Stability: if possible, try to choose place which are politically stable and there are not seen war, terrorism, strikes, riots etc. These can again going to affect your business adversely.

· Real Estate property Cost: This factor is going to take considerable part of your budget while building a new datacenter. Real Estate cost in city or locality shall be taken in consideration and choose the best one.

· Local Taxes and policies: Local area taxes, rules and policies are going to affect you and your potential customers. Hence this should also be in your check list while making a decision.

· Availability of required resources: You need skilled and non-skilled resources for building and operating datacenter. Make sure area have that kind of resources available. Bringing resource from outside is another option but sometime it affects the budget.

· Architecture of building: while designing the building architecture, it should be considered to be secure, safe, green, heat resistant, have raised floors. Building should have protected zones and fire controls. Building should also have process access controls to avoid any loss to property. Position of building should be in such a way that it have optimized utilization of local resources. Building should be scalable to accommodate your future expansion plans.

· Power Feed etc: Power feed availability shall also be considered as it is going to keep Datacenter up and running. Also should have Power backup options like AC generators and UPS etc.

· Operations: Building should have proper staff to take care of facility. It should be kept neat and clean. All equipments should secure.

· Availability of Potential clients: In case the datacenter is built to provide services to external customers (as it is being done now days), it is essential to survey and market your products in target areas. Services served by these kinds of Datacenters are:

Collocation

Cloud Services

o SaaS

o PaaS

o IaaS etc

Managed Services etc

Conclusion

Like any other business, Datacenter Real estate is in business demands and now growing. Data Center is the place which keeps your business going so you need to consider all the factors before you start for the building datacenter and once you have it, it is needed to operate in best way to get return of investment (ROI).

Data Center Development and Action Plan

Data Center Development in right manner can deliver a host of benefits, including improved business, optimized utilization of resources and a reduction in power consumption. Following sections are going to discuss details of hitting bull’s eye. This should be consider as action plan to develop a Data Center:

What does Client HAVE?
You need to have a expert eye on judging and accessing client existing facility which you want to migrate. Some case you might not have existing one and planning to build a new one. In all cases, assessment is the key factor.

What does Client WANT?
Once assessment is for Data Center is done next step is to gather all information and propose comprehensive enterprise architecture. Harness latest tool to keep cost low at best quality. Centralize the facilities, Virtualizes servers, keep carbon foot print to minimal.

Following are some of questions which should have answer before you start:
• How many applications shall be hosted on how many servers?
• Can applications be virtualized?
• Do you need storage (SAN)?
• What kind of backup solution you have to plan?
• What kind of redundancy on network infrastructure need to have?
• What is Disaster Recovery Plan?
• What is recommended geographical location for data center?
• What is the road map of client/ organization for next few years ( for growth planning )?
These are only a few questions. You should come up with detailed questionnaire with client together all needed information.

Why does client WANT?
You are not very much concerned about why does client want this data center but by knowing the business sense of the entire project, enables you to make some critical decisions. For example if client is a bank, you have to plan high security measures and in real time response while if client is going to host a school website for e-learning, you will prefer better streaming of data and voice. Network, servers and other infrastructure shall be designed keeping all these parameter in consideration.

How you are going to achieve this?
Set baseline and streamline: Define standards for business processes, hardware, software, Vendors. Define business owners for quicker decision making and better management of processes. Follow standard and flows.
Choose Vendors and Partners: you are going to need some vendors and partner to help you to take care of sundry jobs for you like network cabling, racking stacking, fixing fire measures, power, UPS, physical security, access etc.
Control variances: As there are lots of people and efforts are being used to achieve development of data center, monitoring plays vital role here. You definitely don’t want to mesh up your project just because you didn’t monitor the milestone and had snag in deliverables.
Control budget: Budget variance is part of other variances but it shall be considered and tracked separately. Budget snag can bring your data center development in to risk.

What’s next?
Once development of data center is done, all designs, configurations, diagrams, plans, processes should be documented and handed over to client and operational teams. You should provide guidelines on providing operational support by the operation team.

What the hack is Disaster Recovery?
Have you given a consideration on what will happen if some disaster will happen and client business is on risk? Disaster can be of any nature, your development plan should take measures to mitigate disaster conditions. Disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity plan (BCP) is planned to have minimum disruption on client business.

Conclusion
Your action plan for data center development shall streamline the design of next-generation data center to ensure the superior resiliency, performance, and agility that enterprise networks now require. The investment made by client to develop/build datacenter should justify in his business.

Data Center Assessment

Introduction

Data Center Assessment is needed to make sure there is no business impact due to any unforeseen problem encountered in near future. Also data center is following most or some of best practices recommended for active data center. Data Center is not only efficient but also secure enough to take care of organization business.

Criteria for General Assessment

Data Center assessment main caters to four major areas: Facilities, Technology, Procedure and Staff. It broadly covers all aspects of Data Center model. Following section highlights topics covered under each area.

Criteria	Topics
Facilities	Access control and security, it refers to physical security to facility Protected zones and fire control Raised floors Position in the building Facility feedings Scalability Structure of the building Cleanliness of the data center
Technology	Transformer / Main distribution for medium and low voltage Power supplier AC and DC power supply Emergency power supply, emergency shutdown, lightning protection Air conditioning and air filtration Temperature and humidity Carrier for connectivity to outside world.
Procedure	ITIL conformity Continuity management Existing certifications Access procedure Data security
Staff	Staff size Multilingual staff Accessibility and availability Qualifications Quality management

Approach for Data Center Assessment

As mentioned in previous section, Assessment covers study of all areas related to Data Center and its business model. Hence it is evident to break down study in to smaller domains and prepare assessment questionnaires for each domain/area.

Sample Questionnaire for Servers and Storage Assessment:

• Total number of Servers HP/IBM/Dell etc residing at this data center
• Total Number of services run from Datacenter
• Operating Systems and Applications running on the Mainframes residing at this data center.
• Total Number of Full Time Engineers (FTE) that supports the administration, maintenance, and failover/recovery of all mainframes residing at this data center:
• Total disk space used for all storages residing at this data center: Total Terabytes
• Total disk space available for all storages residing at this data center: Total Terabytes
• Total floor space for all mainframes residing at this data center: Total Sq. Feet
• Total tape storage capacity used for storage services residing at this data center: Total Terabytes
• Total tape storage capacity available for mainframe services residing at this data center: Total Terabytes
• Total floor space used for all tape storage libraries at this data center: Total Sq. Feet
• Any current plans or schedules to upgrade or retire the mainframe(s) residing at this data center.
• Data Backup is taken offsite or onsite only.
• Does Disaster Recovery Data Center exist?
• What is Business Continuity Plan Policy?

Few questions. You should come up with detailed questionnaire with client together all needed information.

Audits for Data Center Assessment:

It is advised and required to perform internal and external periodic audits for the data center. It provides you details of how good or bad you are. There are some industry standards and certifications which can be achieved by having data center designed and operating as per guidelines. These certifications can also help you to show case it to clients about your Data center’s commitment toward business.

Data Center Star Audit-eco (eco-DCSA) is example of such star ratings for data centers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datacenter_star_audit

Conclusion

Your Assessment plan for data center shall adhere to guidelines to ensure the superior resiliency, performance, and agility that enterprise networks now require. The Data Center Assessment can help you to:

• Identify data center improvements that can help you cost-effectively increase your data center’s efficiency, scalability, and agility.

• Increase resource availability, so you can deploy applications faster and enhance the return on your network investment

• Create a next-generation data center enhancement plan that can help you evolve your data center to meet your long-term goals.

Quote of the Day : Commitment

"Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing."
Thomas A. Edison

Quote of the day : Success

“Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life - think of it, dream of it, live on that idea. Let the brain, muscles, nerves, every part of your body, be full of that idea, and just leave every other idea alone. This is the way to success, that is way great spiritual giants are produced.”

Swami Vivekananda

Depression :

As per WHO studies, by 2020, “Depression” will be 2nd deadest disease after “Heart Attack”. It is surprising but can be true. First thing comes to mind “How depression can kill?” Indeed Yes It can. Depression may be defined as feeling of sad, blue, and unhappy. In other words people go in depression when they face the “unexpected” things in like. Everyone is prone for depression.
Like any other disease is it possible to have immunity from Depression. Answer will be “Yes”. Immunity to this is to prepare ourselves to face everything in life. IF I am successful today, I should be ready to face failure some day. If we get mentally prepared than gravity of Disease will be less.
Extreme of the depression is person losses his tendency to understand thing and start living in his own superficial life.

Men and women of all ages, races, and economic levels can have depression.

Depression can also occur in children and teenagers.
A number of factors can play a role in depression:
• Alcohol or drug abuse
• Life events or situations, such as:
• Breaking up with a boyfriend or girlfriend, failing a class, illness or death in the family, or parents divorcing (for adolescents)
• Childhood events, such as abuse or neglect
• Divorce, death of a friend or relative, or loss of a job (for adults)
• Social isolation (common in the elderly)
• Medical conditions such as hypothyroidism (underactive thyroid), medications (such as sedatives and high blood pressure medications), cancer, major illness, or prolonged pain
• Sleeping problems
Cure: Other than medication and care most important thing which helps to recover is family support. Partner has to identify and support them emotionally in all aspects.

“Holi” sounds like “Holy” so do the meaning.

Holi is depiction of win Truth over evil.

Holi is also representation of mightiness of one who is all above.

For me, Holi is color, energy of life,

HAPPY HOLI TO ALL....

Quote of the Day:

Giving up is easy option ...
and I don't like easy things in my life...


When the going gets tough, the tough get going