When embarking on a data center design project one of the
first questions that most owners ask is; what level of redundancy and
reliability is required to meet the business objectives? Often this question is asked and answered within
each discrete facility or IT systems team, without sufficient collaboration
between the teams to ensure there is end-to-end alignment. In contrast, a successful data center design
project will begin by coordinating the redundancy and reliability across all
facility and IT systems and functions.
This article will address the industry standards
that define various levels of redundancy and reliability, provide a framework
to help guide owners determine what level is required based on their specific
business objectives, and how to coordinate the redundancy and reliability
criteria across all facility and IT systems within the data center design
process. The criteria and framework
provided can assist data center design projects in the critical decisions that
need to be made, whether they are projects implementing new or upgraded
internal data center design projects, or outsourced colocation, managed
services or cloud service data center design projects.
