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Datacentre Rules
27 Dec 2006 | Link | John Herbert
Rules exist for a reason, and an undersea earthquake near Taiwan has just reinforced one of the golden rules for planning and designing data centre E&M infrastructure.
Of course redundancy is a must for design a modern datacentre, however if you need your fault tolerant data centre to be available 24/7 you must plan for the unexpected.
One of the golden rules for data centre planning and design is never, ever, or even think about locating all your N+1 (primary and backup) infrastructure in the same location.
Currently a disaster is unfolding (late Dec 2006) communications across Asia are severely disrupted, telephone and internet services across the region are inaccessible due to an earthquake severing six out of seven undersea cables near Taiwan.
And the question must be asked why are 99% of international communications routed in the same area?
Remedial work to restore service will likely take many weeks to complete. In the meantime, the disruption has hit commercial and international finance operations as engineers struggle to find the cables and effect a repair.
Local services within Hong Kong itself are not effected, therefore servers physically located here in Hong Kong, like RTHK, and our Kelcroft, are accessible over the local network.
However, access to international servers is severely restricted, indeed some ISP's having little or no international service, so overseas websites are out of reach for the time being.
The moral of the story, don't ever think about locating all your eggs or your E&M infrastructure in one locale. Whether its your fibre, power, or cooling expect the unexpected.
Further Information
If you need further information or help planning your datacentre call the experts, contact Mr John Herbert at our Hong Kong office telephone +(852) 2335 9830 or by fax +(852) 2335 9862.