I cant say it enough… Dont colocate equipment in datacenters that dont have true diverse network connectivity. Voicenet claims redundant fiber, but its just a single fiber ring. Yes, a ring has redundant fiber and two paths to prevent a fiber breakage, but its still a single ring operated by a single entity, with an equipment SPOF (single point of failure) at the other end. The only thing a ring protects against is back-how digging up the street or a tree falling down. Datacenters needs to have true diverse fiber. That means separate fiber paths coming in via separate entrances, and the fiber itself must be owned and operated by separate entities with completely separate routing platforms.

The scary thing is there are serveral datacenters in the Delaware Valley that operate off fiber ring topologies. Stay away from these datacenters, its just an outage waiting to happen.

About 2 years ago I fielded a call from someone who lost power at their current data center provider. In addition to being down, they also had some equipment failures (power supplies and some RAM went bad in a few systems). Their provider told them that nothing was wrong with the UPS, rather, it was an issue with the utility caused by a brown out. As soon as I heard this, I told the person that this explanation was completely bogus.

Lets recap the cardinal rules of a good UPS:

1. An online UPS setups should always provide clean line power regardless of supply.

2. If an online UPS fails, an auto-sync transformer bridges line power and utility within 1 Hz and no power is lost, only backup capability is lost.

And lets recap what you need to do in order to make sure the above rules always apply:

1. Check your batteries every 3 months.

2. Replace a battery as soon as its internal resistance rises by 10%

3. Replace a battery as soon as its 4 years old, even if its internal resistance is still within spec.

4. Provide suitable cooling to the UPS.

5. CHECK THE BATTERIES.

I cant stress enough how important batteries are. The entire UPS is built around the concept of having working batteries. Almost every line-effecting outage of a UPS is due to a battery problem. At Quonix, we use Liebert Series 300 UPS systems that have had inverter boards fail, induction coils burn out, and input filter short out, and we NEVER lost output line power. That’s why the Liebert’s cost so much, they are designed to handle failures, but it requires good batteries.

Getting back to the story about the brown out. Any UPS that experiences a brown out or any kind of dirty power, would immediately engage batteries in order to provide clean power while it activates the GENSET cut-over. This requires the UPS to run on batteries for 5-7 seconds. If the batteries cant hold, the UPS will drop offline into bypass mode and auto-sync to utility line power. Once a UPS goes into bypass and syncs to utility power it no longer provides power protection or line conditioning. So all the dirty power goes straight through. If power was lost, GENSET power now comes straight through. And when utility power returns, the GENSET cuts out causing another small blip. This is why the server power supplies and RAM went bad. The dirty, and possibly surging power came right through the UPS into the rack cabinet.

Many providers dont properly maintain their batteries. They just assume the batteries will last 4-5 years. Not the case. I’ve seen brand new battery cabinets have 1 battery go bad after as little as 1 year. Sometimes its just a random manufacturer defect. And in many cases, all it takes is 1 bad battery to foul the entire array.

Want to be sure if your provider is on top of things? Easy, just ask for a copy of their UPS and battery preventative maintenance contract. If they have one, and they should, it should be easy to fax or email you a copy. You can even request a battery report. At Quonix, the vendor we use for our battery maintenance sends us a detailed graphical report with the health of each battery – voltage, impedance, internal resistance, temperature, and age.

For this article I am referring to the newer style of Tate access floor tiles. The newer style has a single piece of laminant that runs from edge to edge. The older style tiles had the laminant end about a quarter inch short of the edge with the remaining space filled with a black edging strip that frequently snapped off.

The new style is great, but over time the laminant will start to pull away, especially in data centers with low humidity. Its simple to repair.

The laminant is held in place by contact glue, similar to a kitchen countertop. Contact glue can be loosened and re-hardened with heat.

To reattach your Tate laminant get a standard clothing Iron – the kind with a non-stick bottom. Set the iron temperature to medium and turn off the steam. Obviously, do this repair work outside the datacenter. Place the iron on the tiles laminant surface and slowing move it around. The laminant surface needs to be heated for at least 2 minutes. After properly heated use a surface roller to apply even pressure over the top of the laminant and press it down hard to the tiles underlying metal frame. Continue to use the roller until the surface has cooled down. At this point your laminant will be 100% re-attached.

Search Engines such as Google or Bing like LOCAL results

When you do an internet search, the search engine knows where you are and in turn will display search results that are close to your region. For example, if you do a search for lawyers, Google will undoubtedly return results for law offices in your area. It does this using IP geography. From your IP address, Google has a rough idea of why you are in the world.

The same technology that determines where you are located can be used to determine where a website/company is located. Now lets be honest, search engines know that most websites are hosted outside their served region. However, if your website is hosted from an IP with a geographic footprint of say Ohio, and your business is in Ohio and mentions this in the indexable content on your site (mailing address, area code, ectc.,.), the combination of these two things is very positive. It tells Google you are physically local to that area and cyber local to that area. All of this is good stuff for your ranking.

So go ahead and host your website with a local provider!

The problem is that some hosting providers use the term cloud computing synonymously with VPS, and as a result the public now thinks they are one in the same. People call me sometimes asking if I do Cloud services, and I know they are talking about VPS, but they have been convinced that Cloud services is what they need. They mainly do this because Cloud Computing sounds better then VPS, and much of the mass media lately has started to emphasize “The Cloud” as a viable product for everyone.

What is VPS?

VPS is virtualization, the concept of running multiple server OS’s inside a single physical server. If you have a small hosting environment, VPS is ideal. Your VPS will sit on a single server with 10-15 other VPS’s that belong to other customers. You and those other customers all share the resources of a single server. VPS is not Cloud, because everything resides on a single physical machine, that machine always provides your VPS with CPU cycles, RAM, and storage.

What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing has been around for years. True cloud computing is the concept of a large pool of servers that work together to provide CPU cycles for computation. End-users send computational work into the cloud, the cloud processes it very quickly, and then it returns the computed result. From a fiscal standpoint, you only pay for the brief amount of time the cloud needed to work on your computations.

Cloud computing is obviously not VPS. The majority of VPS is used to host data. Data hosting has absolutely no need or application to Cloud computing since hosting is inherently very light on CPU processing.

The answer is NO, nothing is wrong.

When you drive home from work, and get of your car and walk 10 yards to your front door (in 30 degree F weather), as soon as you get inside, the first thing that probably goes through your head is… “Ahh… Its nice and warm inside”. And that is with your house thermostate set to 70 degrees F.

A good datacenter will hold a solid 72 degrees 35% relative humidity year round. So yes, in the winter months, when you come in from the outside cold (30-40 degrees F) and walk into a 72 degree F room that happens to be a datacenter you should feel warm. But warm is a relative sensation by our bodies. When its 80 degrees F outside and you walk into the same datacenter, the first thing you say is… “Ahh… Its nice and cold in here”.

The datacenter is always 72 degrees F but in the winter that feels comfortably warm to our bodies after we were just exposed to 35 degree F outside temperatures. So relax, its not “warm” in the datacenter.

The new firm most likely took on a heavy expense of demarcing fiber into the building through the Navy Yard grounds. So they effectively have a single fiber entrance. Agauin, not ideal. Not very carrier diverse either since all the carriers will be on the same fiber trunks in the same conduit. And loop service access (DS-1 and DS-3 cross connects for MPLS) will be terrible.

Its a shame they didn’t reach out to local telecom experts, since the overwhelming concensus would have been to stay away from the Navy Yard. There are 3 solid carrier hotel buildings in Philly, all of which have diverse power, multiple diverse fiber entrance, and the list goes on. The Navy Yard was probably picked by this firm because off the low operating cost and tax incentives, but at the end of the day, not being in a true carrier diverse building will hurt over time.

If you use Facebook, I’m sure you’ve received a few random friend requests from people you don’t know. These requests are actually email harvesting attempts. If you reply or accept the friend request, they will most likely grab your real email – which was the original intended purpose.

The Craigslist Ad technique is similar. If you post an Ad on criagslist there is a very good chance someone will reply. Not all the replies are real people however, in fact, many of the replies are from robots. The response will be generic, for example, “I’m interested, contact me”. If you reply to that email, boom, the robot just grabbed your real email address.

The first hurdle of any building project is electrical power. Any location with nearby poles will have access to either 7,200 or 13,200 volt 3-phase high voltage. But some areas dont have enough capacity on the pole to support a typical data center load of 1-2 Megawatts. And if the local grid can support it, the power might not be diverse, or might be mostly aerial. Now some design firms stress having underground diverse power. Underground power is easy if your in an urban Metro, diverse not so much. I have come to a surprising conclusion however, it doesn’t really matter!

Today’s Generators are nothing like those of the past…

If your facility has a single aerial power feed, thats not too big of a deal these days especially if you intend to install an N+1 redundant generator infrastructure with a few 1000 gallons of fuel. I mean, thats enough capacity to run for a few days, and with multiple generators you can survive a significant localized mechanical failure on top of your grid failure. And lets face it, when was the last time an area lost power for more than 5 days? Modern generators have an amazing performance record and can run for days on end. If you have three 1.5MW generators for a datacenter with a 1.5MW running load, lets face it, your never going dark.

Location is the most important aspect to a datacenter…

This location criteria is two fold. First, you want your location to be in an area of minimized natural disasters. So the probably of flooding and natural conditions that could cause power lose are limited. Second, you want to be very close to diverse fiber optic routes. The number one cause of datacenter outage time is not power or cooling, its IP access. If your facility sits at the cross roads of multiple major networks and has access to fully diverse fiber routes, you greatly eliminate the possibility of an outage. Mechanicals can be solved by buying the right gear and applying good design, but your network quality will also hinge upon your access to fiber.

Unfortunately, many people use ping to diagnose problems, but they dont understand exactly how to interpret the results. First, not all latency is bad. Some devices are slow to respond because there is an issue causing problem. But sometimes, a device is slow to respond because it doesn’t feel like responding right away. Huh? Its called priority queuing. When you ping one server from another server, that ping is treated is high priority by receiving server. The recipient server responds as fast as it can, just as it would for any other request. But when you ping a router, the router can care less about that ping. Routers are designed to treat pings as the lowest priority request, it will get around to it after it finishes the other more important stuff its doing. Two routers right next to other might show 3ms latency, with intermitent spikes to 20ms – perfectly normal.

Interpreting ping data is a balance of latency and packet loss. The two routers might show latency, but upon closer inspection, there is ZERO packet loss, even after 10,000 pings. Though you could have two routers with stable low latency between them, but 3 or 4 percent packetloss. So you have to look at all aspects of the ping result set and the overall environment.