Sometimes the unimaginable happens. A fire can threaten to destroy a data center. To protect the valuable equipment and information housed in the facility, it is critical to install a fire suppression system adequate to the size, type and operational responsibilities of the complex. By definition, a fire suppression system is a combination of fire detection and extinguishing devices designed to circumvent catastrophic business loss as a result of a fire. This loss includes not only the cost of equipment replacement, but also the cost of recovering lost data or business-specific applications.

Detection Systems: The First Line of Defense

A critical component of any suppression system is smoke detectors. Depending on the application, they can be of the photoelectric or ionization type. Detectors perform several vital functions:

• Warn facility occupants of possible fire.
• Shut down all electrical service to the equipment so as not to “fuel the fire.”
• Activate the suppression medium.

If it is properly designed, the detection system can also be used to limit business loss due to power-off interfaces by detecting a system failure rather than an actual smoke condition.

A highly effective detection system is one we call an “intelligent” system. It uses a software-based early warning system to provide an accurate means of detection and verification at the ceiling plane and underfloor plenum.

Water and Clean Agent Gas: Common Suppression Media

Suppression medium is activated if a true emergency is detected. The two most commonly used media to put out a fire are water and clean agent gas such as FM200, Inergen, and NAFS-III.

Determining which type of suppression medium to use depends in large part on the requirements of local code enforcement authorities, building and/or landlord stipulations, and input from insurance underwriters. It also depends on user preference, which is influenced by such factors as cost, business risk relative to data recovery, existing systems, and so forth.

Water sprinkler systems

Water sprinkler systems are found in most buildings regardless of the presence of a data center. As a general rule, where sprinkler systems exist, it is less expensive to convert to a pre-action sprinkler system than to install a clean agent system. Pre-action sprinklers are the water-based choice for data centers and refer to systems that control the flow of water to pipes in the ceiling plane. Smoke and heat activate a valve that advances the water to the ceiling plane. That way, inadvertent damage to equipment from leakage or accidental discharge is prevented. (By comparison, with an ordinary sprinkler system, water is contained in pipes in the ceiling plane at all times.)

Water is highly effective at putting out fires and is well suited for areas like printer rooms that contain combustible materials like paper and toner. The downside of water-based systems is the messy and lengthy clean up and recovery time after a water discharge.

Clean agents

There are primarily three clean agents presently vying for acceptance in the marketplace, FM200, NAF S-III, and Inergen. These agents were developed in response to the phase-out of Halon and the development of NFPA 2001, which was adopted in the Fall of 1994.

Consideration of these agents as alternatives to CO2 in under floor applications is viable. The costs of these systems has dropped in recent years due to more competition in the market place with competing vendors offering these various gas options.

1. FM-200 (Heptafluoropropane – HFC-227EA) is a colorless, liquefied compressed gas. It is stored as a liquid and dispensed into the hazard as a colorless, electrically non-conductive vapor. It leaves no residue. It has acceptable toxicity for use in occupied spaces when used as specified in the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed Significant New Alternatives Policy (SNAP) program rules. FM-200 extinguishes a fire by a combination of chemical and physical mechanisms.

   FM-200 is an effective fire-extinguishing agent that can be used on many types of fires. It is effective for use on Class A Surface-Burning Fires, Class B Flammable Liquid, and Class C Electrical Fires.

   On a weight of agent basis, FM-200 is a very effective gaseous extinguishing agent. The minimum design concentration for total flood applications in accordance with NFPA 2001 shall be 7.0%.

2. NAF S-III is a clean, non-conductive media used for the protection of a variety of potential fire hazards, including electrical and electronic equipment. NAF S-III is a clean gaseous agent at atmospheric pressure and does not leave a residue. It is colorless and non-corrosive.

   NAF S-III acts as a fire-extinguishing agent by breaking the free radical chain reaction that occurs in the flame during combustion and pyrolysis. Like Halon 1301, NAF S-III has a better efficiency with flaming liquids than with deep-seated Class A fires.

   NAF S-III fire extinguishing systems have the capability to rapidly suppress surface-burning fires within enclosures. The extinguishing agent is a specially developed chemical that is a gas at atmospheric pressure and is effective in an enclosed risk area. NAF S-III extinguishes most normal fires at the design concentration by volume of 8.60% at 20° C.

   NAF S-III is stored in high-pressure containers and super-pressurized by dry nitrogen to provide additional energy to ensure rapid discharge. At the normal operating pressure of 360 psi (24.8 bar) or 600 psi (42 bar), NAF is in liquid form in the container.

   Once the system is activated, the container valves are opened and the nitrogen propels the liquid under pressure through the pipe work to the nozzles, where it vaporizes. The high rate of the discharge through the nozzles ensures a homogeneous mixture with the air. Sufficient quantities of NAF S-III should be discharged to meet the concentration required and the pressure at each nozzle must be located to achieve uniform mixing.

3. Inergen is composed of naturally occurring gases already found in Earth’s atmosphere (nitrogen, argon, and CO2). Inergen suppresses fire by displacing the oxygen in the environment. Inergen, however, is not toxic to the occupants because of the way it interacts with the human body. The level of CO2 in Inergen stimulates the rate of respiration and increases the body’s use of oxygen. This compensates for the lower oxygen levels that are present when Inergen is discharged.

   Inergen is stored as a dry, compressed gas and is released through piping systems similar to those utilized in other gaseous suppression systems.

4. FE-25 fire suppression agent is environmentally acceptable replacement for Halon 1301. FE-25 is an odorless, colorless, liquefied compressed gas. It is stored as a liquid and dispensed into the hazard as a colorless, electrically non-conductive vapor that is clear and does not obscure vision. It leaves no residue and has acceptable toxicity for use in occupied spaces at design concentrations. FE-25 extinguishes a fire by a combination of chemical and physical mechanisms. FE-25 does not displace oxygen and therefore is safe for use in occupied spaces without fear of oxygen deprivation.

   FE-25 has zero ozone depleting potential, a low global warming potential, and a short atmospheric lifetime.

   FE-25 closely matches Halon 1301 in terms of physical properties such as flow characteristics and vapor pressure. The pressure traces, vaporization, and spray patterns for FE-25 nearly duplicate that of Halon 1301. The minimum design concentration for FE-25 systems is 8.0% meaning that about 25% more of FE-25 agent will be required. Fe-25 requires about 1.3 times the storage area of Halon.

   When retrofitting existing Halon 1301 system, the nozzles and cylinder assembly will need to be upgraded, however, the piping system likely will not need to be changed, which is cost-effective retrofit that minimizes business interruption.

5. FE-13 is a clean, high-pressure agent that leaves no residue when discharged. FE-13 efficiently suppresses fire by the process of physiochemical thermal transfer. The presence of FE-13 absorbs heat from the fire as a sponge absorbs liquid. FE-13 is safe for use in occupied spaces up to a 24% concentration. Design concentration for total flood application is 16%.
6. Novec 1230 is the newest clean-agent gas available on the market. It is marketed as a long-term sustainable alternative to FM-200 and Halon. Novec 1230 has a 0.0 ozone depletion potential (equivalent to FM-200), but has an atmospheric lifetime of only five days, compared to FM-200’s half life of over 20 years. Novec 1230 has a zero global warming potential. Novec 1230 is designed to a concentration level of 4-6%, which will require less gas than other clean agent. Novec 1230 extinguishes the fire by heat absorption, and is heavier than air, so the gas will sink in the room. Novec 1230 is also safe for electronic equipment, so the data center may not have to be shut down in the event of a gas discharge.

   Novec 1230 will require the same amount of tanks as FM-200, and is stored as a liquid under pressure. Under normal atmospheric conditions, it will exist as a gas. The system is approximately 5-7% more expensive than FM-200.

Table – Relative Cost Comparison of Extinguishing Methods
Scenario Characteristics: Occupied Room Housing electrical equipment 10,000 cu-ft room volume Room fully enclosed and building is fully sprinklered			Design Basis: (1) Total flooding. (2) Does not include the cost of fire alarm and detection system. Probable cost < $4,000. (3) Assume a fully sprinklered building and (4) Includes the cost of the extinguishing agent.
Extinguishing Agent	Design Concentration, Density	Agent Quantity	Installation Cost (4)	Recharge Cost	Design Basis
FM-200	7.44 % by volume	364 lbs	20% more than Inergen	Almost twice the cost of Inergen	(1) + (2)
FE-25	96% by volume	335 lbs	Parallel to FM-200 less gas	20%-25% less than FM-200	(1) + (2)
Inergen	37.5 % by volume	4780-cu-ft			(1) + (2)
NAF S-III	8.60 % by volume	___	___	___	(1) + (2)
Pre-Action Sprinklers	0.1 gpm/s.f water	N/A	1/4 the cost of Halon or Inergen	N/A	(2) + (3)

Note: NAF S-III does not appear to have the market presence to be a viable alternative.

While winter temperatures make it a little easier to distract yourself from the costs of data center cooling, the realities are that for many companies, data center cooling remains a topic of high importance. At BRUNS-PAK, we have long championed design options that can make significant difference in your data center HVAC costs, including:

• Airside Economization: the use of “free” outside air in your cooling plan
• Heat Wheel Integration: integration of heat wheel exchange systems for optimizing energy efficiency
• Higher Data Center Ambient Temperature: following the guidelines in ASHRAE 9.9 means real savings
• Hot Aisle/Cold Aisle Configuration: reducing hot/cold mixing can produce measurable improvements in cooling efficiency

However, one item that companies do not take regular advantage of is CFD Modeling. Computational Flow Dynamics is often used in data center design projects, but its use in understanding airflow and cooling efficiency in existing data centers can yield measurable improvements in the optimized configuration of your data center assets, along with recommendations for HVAC improvements.

As leaders in the use of CFD modeling, BRUNS-PAK can provide expert consultation on ways to leverage this technique to support both short-term energy efficiency optimization modifications, and long-term strategic options for improving your data center sustainability profile.

The rising reliance on real-time, data-informed decision making in the enterprise, is placing new demands on the CIO to increase capacity and quality of service to knowledge workers throughout the enterprise. The CIO challenge in many organizations, however, is how to deliver that increased capability, capacity and quality of service while dealing with rising pressure to cut costs or forego major capital expenditures.

Traditionally, this has meant a strategic decision between:

• Renovation of existing data center facilities (dominantly OPEX)
• Expansion of existing data center facilities (balance of OPEX and CAPEX)
• Building new data center facilities (CAPEX program)

BRUNS-PAK Data Center Design/Build Leaseback Programs offer a secure way to finance new data center capacity through allocation of operating dollars instead of capital dollars. Backed by one of the nation’s leading financial services institutions, BRUNS-PAK leaseback options are integrated with the BRUNS-PAK design/build methodology which offers both the data center owner and the financing organization, a clear, well-documented, fixed price plan for data center construction projects. Financing options are available for both large-scale and moderate-scale programs.

Cloud computing is a top-of-mind initiative for organizations in all industries. The promise of scalable, on-demand infrastructure, consumption-based pricing that reduces capex demands, and faster time-to-market for new solutions constitutes an intoxicating potion for requirements-challenged, cash-strapped IT executives.

However, for many IT executives, the migration to the cloud is not a simple decision for one big reason security. When you own and manage your own infrastructure or employ traditional colo or managed hosting services, there are established policies, practices and risk mitigation strategies that are widely accepted. In the murky waters of the cloud, entirely new risks emerge, including:

• Less transparency on infrastructure security practices, especially in below-the-hypervisor assets
• New multi-tenancy considerations that are not as well documented or understood
• Greater delegation of governance, risk and compliance demands to the cloud services provider

Despite these considerations, the financial lure of the cloud is inescapable. Public cloud services providers (CSPs) like Amazon and Microsoft have created massive economies of scale and are increasingly focused on segmented private cloud services that set a new normal in terms of cost-effectiveness, scalability and the ability to deliver truly agile IT infrastructure.

This has forced many IT departments to begin to look at workload segmentation in a new light. Beyond the questions of transactional vs. archival or batch vs. real-time workloads, organizations now need to look at applications that are “cloud adaptable”, both in terms of performance/technical readiness and in terms of governance, risk and compliance. New, business-driven applications like social CRM, human capital management, collaborative procurement and predictive analytics are all strong candidates for migration to on-demand cloud architecture.

This leads to another ‘new normal’ in IT infrastructure hybrid architectures. Hybrid IT infrastructure bridges public and private clouds, managed services providers and on-premise data centers. This composite fabric needs to be secured and managed for optimized performance, compliance and risk, opening up entirely new challenges and ushering in whole new classes of automation and management toolkits, such as internal cloud services brokers. It also forces greater emphasis on internal plans for virtualization or on-premise cloud deployments that can be integrated seamlessly in these complex architectures.

Making sense of this trend and its associated technologies can be confusing. BRUNS-PAK Consulting Services is a growing part of BRUNS-PAK’s comprehensive data center services offerings. Our consulting services team is expert at helping customers to plan and implement complex strategies for alternative infrastructures and dynamic IT deployment. By helping IT management understand and optimize the following critical infrastructure considerations, we can make it easier to align IT strategy with business needs, and reduce the rise of shadow IT initiatives:

• Value of current facilities renovation/expansion (CAPEX vs. OPEX)
• New data center build options (CAPEX)
• Alternative financing options/leaseback (OPEX)
• Co-location design and optimization
• Cloud integration
• Containers/Pods
• Network/WiFi design and management
• Migration/relocation options
• Hybrid computing environment design and deployment

Funding a data center build, renovation or expansion does not have to mean draining capital resources.

Big Data. Mobile enablement. The knowledge economy. The reasons are myriad, but the impact is singular…data center demand continues to grow in the enterprise, regardless of industry or corporate maturity. Today’s CIO must figure out how to satisfy an increasingly demanding audience of users, seeking access to data across a diversifying array of applications, and do so with continually stretched IT budgets.

In fact, many legacy data center assets are being stressed by power density and distribution constraints, rising cooling costs and complex networking and peak load demand curves. However, retrofitting, upgrading or consolidating multiple legacy, lower performing assets into a newly designed and constructed facility, or constructing large new data center facilities to support enterprise growth, can require significant capital.

At BRUNS-PAK, our proprietary Synthesis2 methodology integrates a structured approach to data center planning and construction that includes rigorous estimation and structured adherence to budget guidelines throughout the project. This discipline has helped us define breakthrough approaches to data center financing driven by operating cash flow instead of capital reserves. This can dramatically expand an organization’s ability to support required IT expansion in the face of rising end user demand.

The basic concept behind OpEx financing is the use of long-established structured finance techniques that leverage the credit rating of investment grade companies (BBB or better) to finance the new assets or improvements on a long term basis. In a retrofit or upgrade scenario where energy savings are anticipated as a result of the project, the financing to provide the capital improvements can be secured by the cash flow generated by reduced energy usage. For a new build scenario, the financing to construct and use the facility can be secured by a well structured, bondable, long-term lease.

To illustrate how this can work, here are two scenarios outlined below for a retrofit and new build:

Scenario 1: Energy Saving Retrofit/Upgrade Financing

Financing an energy efficient retrofit or upgrade to a data center requires a few key considerations:

• The amount of capital required to complete the retrofit or upgrade
• The energy savings that will generated
• The term of those energy savings which often coincides with the obsolescence life of the assets being deployed

Baseline anticipated energy savings are first established through an energy audit to determine the as-is energy costs and plan the target cost profile. The difference between current costs and future costs is presumed to apply to the debt service on the construction. If the actual annual energy savings exceed the annual debt service costs of the underlying financing, the owner or user can keep the positive difference or spread between those streams. For example, if an organization invests in a $50 million upgrade that results in $12.5 million in energy savings per year, here is a basic financing option. First, let’s presume 84 month (7 year) financing at a 7% interest rate. That results in an annual debt service cost of $7.5 million. That $7.5 million is paid from the energy savings, and the organization retains the remaining $5 million in savings. After the financing is repaid, the full energy savings flow to the organization’s bottom line.

An important note in this example…the organization has not outlaid any cash for the construction.

Scenario 2: New Build Financing

For new facility financing, we will take into account a different set of considerations, including:

• The amount of capital and the construction schedule for the facility
• The credit rating of the user
• The desired term that the user will occupy the facility which is used to establish the lease term.

In this scenario, the user will execute what is known as a bondable, net-lease that provides sufficient duration to completely pay back the financing provided. Once again, the user is not required to outlay capital for the construction. Instead, they pay for the facility through lease payments that factor in the term, total construction cost, construction period interest, and the assumed interest rate applied to the project.

For example, assume an investment grade rated company wants to consolidate three existing legacy data centers into a new, state of the art facility that will cost approximately $50 million, but they do not want to tap their capital budget. They are, however, prepared to occupy and pay for annual use of the facility over a 15 year period. If we were to apply a 6% interest rate to this project and assume the hypothetical loan would be repaid ratably over the 15 year lease, the company would pay approximately $5.5 million annually over the lease term, with an option to buy the facility at term end.

The BRUNS-PAK Advantage

Using structured finance techniques to finance long term assets is not limited to these two scenarios discussed. In fact, for organizations with strong credit ratings, there are practically endless ways to structure a capital efficient transaction for data center facilities. As noted earlier, BRUNS-PAK’s track record for accurate estimation of facility construction costs and long-standing history of on-budget project completion, have become powerful assets when discussing OpEx solutions.

With over 6,000 customers in all industry, government and academic sectors, BRUNS-PAK’s proven process has helped us line up multiple sources for structured financing that we can introduce into project plans to ensure that you can plan and implement a program that effectively supports your current and future IT infrastructure demands.

In rapidly evolving markets, bigger is not always better. Is your data center designed for efficiency?

The aggressive efforts of DISA, the Defense Information Systems Agency, to rationalize and consolidate mission-critical data center facilities has put a spotlight on the challenges of planning a data center infrastructure that is reliable, resilient, responsive, secure and efficient at the same time, from both an energy utilization and financial perspective. It is easy to criticize DISA’s efforts as emblematic of government inefficiency, but that would be an unfair assessment, as there are plenty of equally egregious commercial examples of overbuilding (and underbuilding) in the data center space. Especially in the current hybrid architecture marketplace, designing a data center facility to effectively and efficiently meet both current and anticipated needs takes careful planning and expert engineering.

At BRUNS-PAK, we believe that part of the reason so many projects end up misaligned with the demand profile is that both the customer and vendor design/build teams fail to account for the six critical factors that influence efficiency when working at the design phase of the project:

• Reliability
• Redundancy
• Fault Tolerance
• Maintainability
• Right Sizing
• Expandability

How you balance these individual priorities can make all the difference between a cost-effective design and one that eats away at both CAPEX and OPEX budgets with equal ferocity. Here is a quick review of each critical consideration.

Reliability

The data center design community has increasingly acknowledged that workloads, and their attendant service level and security requirements, are potentially the most critical driver in defining data center demands. Workloads dictate the specifics of the IT architecture that the data center must support, and with that, the applicability of cloud/colo services, pod designs, and other design/build options. Before initiating a data center project, having a clear picture of the workloads that the site must support will facilitate accurate definition of reliability for the project.

Redundancy

The goal of redundancy is increased reliability, which is defined as the ability to maintain operation despite the loss of use of one or more critical resources in the data center. Recognizing that all systems eventually fail, how you balance component vs. system-wide redundancy (N+1 vs. 2N, 2N+1, etc.) will significantly reshape the cost/benefit curve. Here, it is important to design for logical and reasonable incident forecasts while balancing mean-time-to-failure and customary mean-time-to-recover considerations.

Fault Tolerance

While major system failures constitute worst-case scenarios that ultrareliable data centers must plan for, far more common are point failures/faults. In order to achieve fault tolerance, data centers must have the ability to withstand a single point-of-failure incident for any single component that could curtail data processing operations. Typically, design for fault tolerance emphasizes large electrical/mechanical components like HVAC or power distribution, as well as IT hardware/software assets and network or telecommunications services, all of which will experience periodic failures. Design for fault tolerance should involve more than simple redundancy. Rather, effective design must balance failover capacities, mean-time-to-repair, repair vs. replace strategies, and seasonal workflow variances to ensure that the data center is able to support service level demands without requiring the installation of excess offline capacity.

Maintainability

When designing a data center facility, a common mistake is failing to account for maintainability. Excess complexity can rapidly add to costs since even redundant systems must be exercised and subjected to preventive maintenance. In fact, planning a consistent preventive maintenance schedule can be one of the most effective contributors to long-term efficiency by reducing the need for overcapacity on many key infrastructure components.

Right-Sizing/Expandability

When properly accounted for, these final two factors work in tandem to help design/build teams create an effective plan for near-term and long-term requirements. Modern design strategies include the use of techniques like modular/pod design or cloud integration that engineer in long-term capacity growth or peak demand response. This means that the team can better ensure that near-term buildout does not deliver excess capacity simply as a buffer against future demand. Engineering teams can readily design modern infrastructure to smoothly scale to meet even the most aggressive growth forecasts.

Treated as a portfolio, these six factors offer the data center design team diverse levers to balance service delivery against cost while ensuring that the final infrastructure can meet demand without breaking the bank, either through initial capital investment, or long-term operating cost.

How BRUNS-PAK Can Help

Over the past two years, BRUNS-PAK has evolved its proprietary design/build approach to incorporate the evolving array of strategies and tools available to data center planning teams, resulting in the BRUNS-PAK Hybrid Efficient Data Center Design program. Through an interactive process that acknowledges both an organization’s IT requirements and the associated facilities infrastructure needs’, this program delivers a strategic approach to addressing the six critical factors influencing efficient data center design while retaining the performance, resilience and reliability needed in enterprise computing environments. Through our expanded consulting services group, and well-established design/build services team, BRUNS-PAK is uniquely positioned to assist customers seeking to create a long-term strategic direction for their data center that satisfies all stakeholders, including end-users, IT and finance.

Cornerstone concepts to support cybersecurity

While working on a recent project, we came across a newsletter authored by Deb Frincke, then Chief Scientist of Cybersecurity Research for the National Security Division at the Pacific Northwest National Lab in Seattle, which outlined her team’s initiatives for “innovative and proactive science and technology to prevent and counter acts of terror, or malice intended to disrupt the nation’s digital infrastructures.” In cybersecurity, the acknowledged wisdom is that there is no “perfect defense” to prevent a successful cyberattack. Dr. Frincke’s framework defined four cornerstone concepts for architecting effective cybersecurity practices:

• Predictive Defense through use of models, simulations, and behavior analyses to better understand potential threats
• Adaptive Systems that support a scalable, self-defending infrastructure
• Trustworthy Engineering that acknowledges the risks of “weakest links” in complex architecture, the challenges of conflicting stakeholder goals, and the process requirements of sequential buildouts
• Cyber Analytics to provide advanced insights and support for iterative improvement

In this framework, the four cornerstones operate interactively to support a cybersecurity fabric that can address the continuously changing face of cyber threats in today’s world.

If you are a CIO with responsibility for an enterprise data center, you may quickly see that these same cornerstone principles provide an exceptional starting point for planning a resilient data center environment, especially with current generation hybrid architectures. Historically, the IT community has looked at data center reliability through the lens of preventive defense…in the data center, often measured through parameters like 2N, 2N+1, etc redundancy.

However, as the definition of the data center expands beyond the scope of internally managed hardware/software into the integration of modular platforms and cloud services, simple redundancy calculations become only one factor in defining resilience. In this world, Dr. Frincke’s four-part framework provides a valuable starting point for defining a more comprehensive approach to resilience in the modern data center. Let’s look at how these principles can be applied.

Predictive Defense: We believe the starting point for any resilient architecture is comprehensive planning that incorporates modeling (including spatial, CFD, and network traffic) and dynamic utilization simulations for both current and future growth projections to help visualize operations before initiating a project. Current generation software supports extremely rich exploration of data center dynamics to minimize future risks and operational limitations.

Adaptive Systems: Recently, Netflix has earned recognition for its novel use of resilience tools for testing the company’s ability to survive failures and operating abnormalities. The company’s Simian Army, consisting of services (monkeys) that unleash failures on their systems to test how adaptive their environment actually is. These tools, including Chaos Monkey, Janitor Monkey and Conformity Monkey, demonstrate the importance of adaptivity in a world where no team can accurately predict all possible occurrences, and where unanticipated consequence of a failure anywhere in a complex network of hardware fabrics can lead to cascading failures. The data center community needs to challenge itself to find similar means for testing adaptivity in modern hybrid architectures if it is to rise to the challenge of ultrareliability as current scale.

Trustworthy Engineering: Another hallmark of cybersecurity is the understanding that the greatest threats often lie inside the enterprise with disgruntled employees, or simply as a result of human error. Similarly, in modern data center design, tracking a careful path that iteratively builds out the environment while checking off compliance benchmarks and ‘trustworthiness’ at each decision point, becomes a critical step in avoiding the creation of a hybrid house-of-cards.

Analytics: With data center infrastructure management (DCIM) tools becoming more sophisticated, and with advancing integration between facilities measurement and IT systems measurement platforms, the availability of robust data for informing ongoing decision-making in the data center is now possible. No longer is resilient data center architecture just about the building and infrastructure. So, operating by ‘feel’ or ‘experience’ is inadequate. Big data now really must be part of the data center management protocol.

By leveraging these four cornerstone concepts, we believe IT management can begin to frame a more complete, and by extension, robust plan for resiliency when developing data center architectures that bridge the wide array of deployment options in use today. This introduction provides a starting point for ways to use the framework, but we believe that further exploration by data center teams from various industries will create a richer pool of data and ideas that can advance the process for all teams.

REFERENCES

Frincke, Deborah, “I4 Newsletter”, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Spring-Summer 2009.