By Steve Tylock
Provisioning Essential Services
If you’re ready to admit that computer services are essential to the operation of your organization, are you also ready to accept that power and cooling for IT systems are essential?
It’s absolutely understood that your cloud provider needs to ensure that they have solved these problems, and if everything you do is based in the cloud, maybe this article doesn’t mean much in your environment.
But let’s suppose for the moment that your organization does have a server (or two), and that server supports the organization in a variety of ways: user authentication, file storage, and/or hosting applications for financial, customer management, planning, and/or operations.
And there’s a cost for not being able to complete transactions as normally scheduled…
Power
Consider some of the regular power events that might happen in your typical technology environment:
- Power spike
- Brownout
- Loss of power for one to ten minutes
- Loss of power for more than 10 minutes
In our local environment there are areas that get more of these events than you might expect – It’s attributable to line maintenance, natural events, and management. But in any case, computer equipment isn’t a fan of erratic power supply.
Short Term Conditioning
And it’s easy enough to protect equipment. A simple (quality) surge protector will help ensure devices don’t receive a spike, and a battery backed Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) will solve a loss of power for a short time.
But do be aware – there are different technologies. The better tech comes with a more expensive price (funny how that works). Also important – how the UPS communicates with the equipment it protects. Good software can allow the UPS to alert a connected server that a) it is running on battery, and b) that the battery has 25 minutes of life left and c) critically alert the server when that available life drops below a comfortable threshold to allow the server to shut itself down.
We consider a UPS essential for all system infrastructure – servers, switches, firewall, and internet connectivity. It can be expensive to provide a battery for each end user device, but there may be some critical systems where it makes sense. And while printing during a power outage isn’t usually a top concern, it might be for your specific environment.
Long Term Outage
If you’re running a critical infrastructure that can never be unavailable, you’ve probably already gone down this road – but for everyone else’s benefit, a generator can cover arbitrary outages – usually starting up automatically within minutes and providing power for days. You’ll get to a formula for how much power is needed for how long – to size the generator, fuel tanks, and arrangements for refilling.
Instead of managing all this yourself, you might prefer to locate your equipment inside a data center that has already solved this problem.
Cooling
Unexpected cooling needs usually come up after a change:
- Relocation to a new building that appears to have a different policy for AC than the previous
- Renovation where walls, computers, and people get moved to new locations
- Creation of a new service or “thing” where one didn’t exist before, sometimes in relation to organizational growth
The common “spark” for realizing this new need would be the first three-day heat surge of the summer – over a weekend. (When you find out the landlord doesn’t see a need to cool the building on the weekends…)
Not All Cooling Is Equivalent
Providing a comfortable environment for a person is not the same as providing a comfortable environment for a computer – and the equipment used isn’t the same.
People seem to like temperatures in the 68-72 degree range and humidity in the range of 30-50 percent relative humidity. Computers on the other hand tend to be more picky (if you can believe that!). You may want to control their humidity based on the specific criteria of the location.
And because of this, you will find HVAC equipment specifically rated as “Computer Room Air Conditioning” or CRAC versus “Comfort Cooling” (for the humans).
Portable / Temporary / Augmented
These terms come up when talking about cooling as in…
Can’t we just put this portable unit in and pipe the exhaust to the outside wall over there?
We just need to cover July and August until we …
We can rely on the building AC, and add this smaller room-sized unit.
The deal is this – sure, you can save money in the short term, but please ensure your measures don’t leave you out of service on the hottest day of the summer when you’re already at the beach!
Reliability Can Be Measured
More than anything, I’d like to make sure you realize that the power and cooling needs of any environment can be added up. The solution is just pushing those numbers around. It’s not rocket science, but still many organizations live with the occasional outage.
The question I have though is – do you really know how often that thing happens? Have you priced out what it’s costing? That’s measurable too.
If this is a topic you’d like to explore more, we’d be happy to talk. The fun starts when you bring up the unique situations that face your organization.
In the Rochester area, CMIT Solutions provides local, responsive IT support and technology services for small to mid-sized businesses. As your IT partner, we ensure systems are running, your data is secure, and your staff is productive. Backed by a national system, we have over 200 locations across the country with local ownership in Rochester.
Steve Tylock is a systems infrastructure professional with broad information technology experiences in servers, desktops, networks, security, applications, team development, and solution architecture across the domains of business, education, government, and manufacturing. He specializes in analyzing environments leading to strategies and plans for growth and excellence.
