Data Center Development and Action Plan
Data Center development in the right approach can deliver a host of benefits, including improved business, optimized utilization of resources and a reduction in power consumption. The following sections discuss the details of hitting a bull’s eye! These should be considered as action plans to develop a data center.
What does the Client HAVE?
You need to have a expert eye on judging and accessing client existing facility which you want to migrate to. In some cases you might not have an existing one and are planning on building a new one. In all cases, assessment is the key factor.
What does the Client WANT?
Once the assessment for a data center is done next step is to gather all information and propose comprehensive enterprise architecture. Harness the latest tools to keep costs low and maintain the best quality; centralize facilities, implement server virtualization, keep the carbon foot print to a minimum.
Here 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. A detailed questionnaire should be presented to the client to gather all required information.
Why Does the Client Want this?
You need not be very concerned about why a client wants this data center, but by knowing the business sense of the entire project it enables you to make some critical decisions. For example if client is a bank, you have to plan high security measures in real time response. If client is going to host a school website for e-learning, you will prefer streaming of data and voice. Network, servers and other infrastructure shall be designed keeping all these parameters in consideration.
How you are going to achieve this?
Set baseline and streamline:
Define standards for business processes, hardware, software, Vendors. Define to business owners a quicker decision making and better management of processes. Follow standards and flows.
Choose Vendors and Partners:
you are going to need some vendors and partners to help take care of sundry jobs like network cabling, racking stacking, fixing fire measures, power, UPS, physical security, access etc.
Control variances:
As there are lots of people, efforts are made to achieve development of data center, monitoring plays a vital role here. You definitely don’t want to mess 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 snags can bring your data center development in to risk.
What’s next?
Once development of a data center is done, all designs, configurations, diagrams, plans, processes should be documented and handed over to the client and operational teams. You should provide guidelines on providing operational support by the operation team.
What is Disaster Recovery?
Have you given a consideration on what will happen if there is a disaster, the risk involved? Disaster can be of any nature, your development plan should take measures to mitigate disaster conditions. Disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity plan (BCP) are planned to have minimum disruption on client business.
Conclusion
Your action plan for a data center development shall streamline the design of a next-generation data center to ensure superior resiliency, performance, and agility that enterprise networks now require. The investment made by the client to develop/build a data center should justify his business.
You can also keep up to date with current trends and technology by visiting Data Center Talk where we keep you informed on important changes as they occur.