As a college intern, I spent several years at the University of Miami. With it’s proximity to the warm Caribbean Atlantic Ocean, Miami University was a great school for anyone looking for some education matched with some fun in the sun. Yet, every so often (from August to November), the winds and the rain would whip up causing ferocious hurricanes to rip through the university campus. These winds and rains would shut down the campus, kill power systems, create destruction and generally make life pretty annoying.
With this in mind, we here at QuoteColo want to take this time to talk about one of the more important yet not talked about aspects of data center providers, disaster recovery solutions.
Sandy And Data Center Downtime
For anyone who lives in the NYC metro area, in some way shape of form Hurricane Sandy impacted your life. As it pertains to data center providers, Hurricane Sandy effectively put multiple SAS 70 compliant data centers out of business for an extended period of time due to Cloud servers, Dedicated Servers, cabinets and power systems all being flooded with the Hudson River.
This data center services downtime led many companies who relied upon the uptime of those data centers to seek out immediate assistance from data center providers who remained unaffected by Hurricane Sandy. A notable effected company was BuzzFeed who ended up reprovisioning their website through the use of the Amazon Cloud. Overall, according to the good folks over at Gartner roughly $8 billion dollars in operating costs and overall business was lost due to the storm.
However, for companies who aren’t as prominent as BuzzFeed, the scramble to find another data center colocation provider began and a question began to form: If a data center can be taken out of service due to the weather, are there data centers providers who offer full geographically diverse data redundancy/replication?
The answer is yes.
Geographically Diverse Data Centers Providers
What do we mean by geographically diverse data center providers? As it sounds, a geographically diverse data center provider is a Cloud hosting, colocation, managed service provider who either operates or leases space in a data center with data replication to an auxiliary facility located outside of their own extended power grid.
When it comes to utilizing a data center provider, power is everything. The reason you need to look for a data center facility solution that has a backup data center outside of its own power grid is because if the grid goes down, both facilities go down. Even though your provider supplies data replication, if their backup data center is down, all the replication in the world isn’t going to help you.
When you invest in data centers, you need to make sure your provider has a fall back facility located outside of their own extended geographic location to insure if one facility fails, your data is still alive in well in the backup data center location.
Data Redundancy
The other highly important aspect of data center facilities is the providers’ ability to replicate your critical business data to another facility, instantly. Without true data redundancy, without backup data stored in another high tiered data center facility, your critical business operations are only as good as the uptime of your data center MSP.
When it comes down to it, as a consumer, it is your job to understand every aspect of the data center you are investing your business solutions with. Here at QuoteColo we can help you with 24 – 48 hour comprehensive quote turnarounds, understanding the what hosting service you need (Cloud, dedicated servers, fully managed servers, colocation) and we can also put you in direct contact with the data center providers who meet your needs/budget. However, at the end of the day, you need to ask the questions and understand what you’re getting.
Point in case before you invest your money with a data center provider find out if they utilize geographically diverse auxiliary data centers who instantly replicates data. If the answer is no, you need to worry about storms like Hurricane Sandy.