Reliability in data centers 

If the IT infrastructure fails, there’s a lot at stake for enterprises. As a basic component of business operations, IT supports not only production processes but also management, databases, customer relations and supplier relations.

Highly available IT systems for optimal data center reliability

Many relatively small enterprises in particular rely on colocation data centers for safe hosting of their IT infrastructure and the benefits of high availability. Here the focus should always be on comprehensive data center security. Professional and experienced data center providers like ITENOS are aware of the various pitfalls and know how to achieve extremely high security and reliability with holistic concepts. To determine how reliable a specific data center is, you should look at its error tolerance. Redundancy is a core element of this. Not only with regard to hardware components such as servers, but also with regard to power supply, transmission paths, and many other trouble-prone components. Defective or outdated hardware, incorrect configurations, missing maintenance or power failures, for example, can lead to restricted availability. When choosing a data center, enterprises should therefore pay attention to its tier classification, which says a lot about the actual high availability and performance capability of a given data center.

Why downtime is so costly

A system outage entails risks, and every downtime costs enterprises a lot of money in many ways. According to a Gartner study, the average cost of a minute of downtime is EUR 1,400. However, this is often only the tip of the iceberg. For one thing, an IT outage immediately leads to lost productivity and thus to lost income. And costs due to data losses or associated recovery costs also add to downtime costs. And don’t forget: If the reliability of a data center is not assured, an IT disruption or outage can additionally lead to immaterial losses such as reduced customer trust or lower customer satisfaction, as well as damage to the reputation of the enterprise concerned.

In good shape with a business continuity plan and disaster recovery

In order to protect against prolonged and costly downtime, what matters for enterprises is not only the reliability of the data center but also quick recovery after an incident. Just as with a redundant IT infrastructure, disaster recovery should also be planned as a preventive measure. To avoid being persistently impaired by disruptions, it is a good idea to create a business continuity plan. Scalable solutions can be implemented with expert support and managed IT services, while at the same time keeping costs under control and transparent. Redundant backups play an important role in minimizing the extent of damage if something goes wrong.

Georedundancy for even more security

Storing copies (preferably in different locations) is not only important for data backups; the term “redundancy” is very often heard with regard to data center infrastructure. Especially enterprises and public authorities that belong to the critical sector and are therefore dependent on the constant availability of their systems, also need georedundancy. For this, the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) stipulates a minimum distance of 200 kilometers between two data centers to ensure reliability even in the event that one of the two mirrored data centers fails due to a natural disaster, such as a thunderstorm, flooding, earthquake, or other trans-regional event such as a chemical accident or a nuclear accident. Here it is important that the redundant data center not only provides the same server functions but also has the same version of the data, so it can take over from the other data center at any time. When enterprises rely on professional services and redundant structures for their IT infrastructure, they can achieve the greatest possible data center reliability – the basis for ongoing business success in an era of digitalization.