FEATURE: DATA CENTRE COMMISSIONING
JEROEN SCHLOSSER, MANAGING
DIRECTOR, EQUINIX, MENA
What are the most important factors
in determining a data centre’s
critical load?
• Digital disruption, which is the
impact of digital technologies
and new business models on a
company’s current value proposition
and resulting market position, is
increasingly becoming an important
factor for enterprises looking to start
their cloud journey.
• A data centre migration must start
with very careful planning and a
phased approach to execution,
without causing a significant impact
to business operations, service
delivery, performance and data
protection requirements.
• Planning and design is the first
step – how and by whom your
IT services and applications are
being used and how do you want
to segment resources – is a good
place to begin. Many companies
see cloud interconnectivity as an
after-the-fact conundrum, but if
you think interconnection-first, then
you can build a higher performing,
scalable, secure and cost-effective
interconnected-cloud infrastructure.
Multicloud interconnectivity is
a growing requirement among
enterprises, where applications are
deployed across multiple clouds
to decrease IT spending, increase
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the quality of service delivery, or
for redundancy to ensure business
continuity (BC) and disaster recovery
(DR). By 2020, 86% of companies
will be interconnecting multiple
clouds across multiple locations and
over the next five years to realize a
lower capex.
• Once you have an interconnection
strategy, build the cloud accounts, set
up the networks and test the security.
Ensure the environment is accessible,
useable and available to all the
systems and mechanisms you need
to migrate workloads. You’ll also need
to evaluate your data and workloads
based on a new type of usage-based
sizing and scalability.
• The final step is to migrate –
enterprises need to think about
whether they need to rebuild
the servers, clone or containerise
applications when migrating to the
cloud? Other considerations include
understanding software and resource
pricing and licensing terms, BC/DR
service level agreements and workload
compatibility within hybrid cloud
infrastructures, just to name a few.
Do high density deployments need
additional amounts of supporting
infrastructure?
• Power and cooling demands are
increasing exponentially and it’s an
advantage – environmentally and
for businesses – if companies can
handle a lot more power in the same
space. High-density data centres
help drive environmental and
operational cost efficiencies.
• For example, one Fortune 100
organisation’s power density
inefficiency resulted in its older
servers consuming 60% of the
“High-density
data centres
help drive
environmental
and operational
cost efficiencies.”
energy, but only contributing 4% of
the compute capacity.
• The trends driving this increase
in data centre density include -
Power and cooling cost allocations
accounting for 80% of the
infrastructure operating costs,
reduced distance in cable runs and
networks, reduced cooling and
space footprint, power and cooling
availability and efficiency and
virtualisation and cloud-
dense workloads.
• Equinix and its Global Solutions
Architects (GSAs) can be integral
to supporting the development of
current and future-state data centre
architectures as part of our data
centre and service transformation
programmes. For example, Equinix
worked in the UK with a wealth
management company which started
with a nine-rack requirement, and we
deployed six racks yielding a 30%
reduction in space and cooling area.
How important is it to consider
Availability Requirements?
• Availability is the degree to which a
system or component is operational
and accessible when it’s required for
use and recent news reports have
given companies much to think
about in terms of the safety of their
IT infrastructures. In a data centre,
having a reliable system design is
the most critical variable. In case of
a failure, getting the IT equipment
and business processes up and
running as fast as possible, and
keeping downtime to a minimum is
the most important consideration
for any business having their data in
a data centre.
• Whether a data centre resides
on-premises or in a colocation
centre, there are ways to mitigate
or prevent these outages. Below
are some strategies we deploy at
Equinix to maintain our industry-
leading 99.9999% uptime record
and protect our more than 9500 +
customers from costly downtime.
• All Equinix IBX data centres are
equipped with full UPS power, back-
up systems and N+1 (or greater)
redundancy, with a proven, industry-
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