Fire suppression<\/strong>.\u00a0 If something catches fire inside a data center, which CAN and HAS happened, it must be addressed quickly and effectively.\u00a0 Data centers have special fire suppression systems that are designed to detect and extinguish a fire with minimal damage to the surrounding equipment.\u00a0 Consider, if a server or power supply were to catch on fire, you can’t just hose it down with water – this would be catastrophic to nearby equipment.\u00a0 Therefore specialized sensors and fire suppression gear is required.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nAt a nominal $20k per server, it would suck to have someone drive up a truck in the middle of the night, and steal a bunch of them.\u00a0 Even worse, the real reason data centers have such tight security, is to protect the data<\/em> on the hard drives.\u00a0 If someone steals a bag full of hard drives, the potential damage is WAY worse than stealing the equivalent cost in servers, because this could result in the disclosure of bank records, healthcare data, customer lists, trade secrets, and who knows what else.<\/p>\nLikewise, if the data is lost or destroyed, perhaps due to theft, fire, attack, or natural disaster, there could be irreparable harm to the data’s owners.<\/p>\n
Therefore, the main reason that data centers are hardened is to protect the\u00a0data<\/em> rather than the servers which process the data.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
<\/span>Designing a Data Center<\/span><\/h2>\nA LOT goes in to planning a data center build, and in order to really understand space data centers, we need to understand those complexities and challenges.<\/p>\n
Although everything is based on requirements which vary by use case, anything in Financial Services or Healthcare sectors have some fairly stringent requirements, and I will assume those as a baseline when describing data centers and data center operations.\u00a0 A “general-purpose” data center should be PCI certified, and compliant with GLBA as well as HIPPA.<\/p>\n
\n- PCI (Payment Card Industry) is a credit card industry standard which defines and requires physical hardening as well as strong protections for payment card and transaction data.<\/li>\n
- GLBA (Graham-Leach-Bliley Act) is a law which applies to the Financial Services industry, and requires physical hardening as well as strong protections for bank data.<\/li>\n
- HIPPA (Health Information Portability and Privacy Act) is a law which applies to the Healthcare industry, and requires strong protections for healthcare data.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
If any tenant within a specified data center zone plans to process credit card transactions, that entire data center zone must be PCI certified.\u00a0 Likewise, if a tenant gathers, stores, or processes bank data, there are data center-wide requirements for physical hardening and other forms of physical security.\u00a0 And, if a tenant gathers, stores, or processes healthcare data, some or all of the equipment within the corresponding zone may fall in to scope for the corresponding HIPPA security requirements.<\/p>\n
If the data center is intended to host mission-critical applications such as telemetry and support for space missions, or real-time monitoring of patient vitals, the availability requirements are way more stringent.\u00a0 Other use cases, such as hosting government-classified data may require much more hardening.\u00a0 Likewise, a data center hosting only “my pictures of cats dot com”, which has no impact to personal, financial, or healthcare data, and certainly doesn’t host any trade secrets nor government secrets might have much less stringent availability and hardening requirements.\u00a0\u00a0And, obviously, lower-end requirements have a much lower associated cost, while higher-end requirements have a significantly higher cost.<\/p>\n
<\/span>Location<\/span><\/h3>\nBut, as they say, it all starts with location, and location is everything.<\/strong><\/p>\nThese are some<\/em> of the planning considerations when picking a data center location:<\/p>\n\n- Geographical threat analysis.\n
\n- Is the proposed location near any airports, factories, refineries, or other industrial facilities that might cause a hazard of fire, explosion, or chemical release?<\/li>\n
- Is the proposed location near any natural hazards, such as a forest that could burn, or a lake or river that could flood?<\/li>\n
- Is the proposed location near any tourist attractions, arenas, concert halls, amusement parks, or similar?\u00a0 The thought process is that these could be targets for mass shooting and \/ or other forms of terrorism.\u00a0 (Not kidding – this is ACTUALLY a question that has come up during a DC risk-assessment)<\/li>\n
- Is the proposed location prone to natural disasters (flood, tornado, hurricane, blizzard) and in-land enough to survive a tidal wave?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n
- Should be close enough to one or more major roads which facilitates delivery of generator fuel and data center equipment, but far enough from all major roads that it wouldn’t be affected by a major crash or accident.\u00a0 Many data centers are built on a slight plateau or employ dirt berms if they are too close to a freeway, for example.<\/li>\n
- Needs to be near one or more power substations.\u00a0 If not, the power company will build a substation near your data center, and charge you for it.<\/li>\n
- Needs to accommodate network access from various providers, as needed.\n
\n- The data center can act as a peering point for multiple providers<\/li>\n
- The data center can act as a junction on one or more providers’ networks<\/li>\n
- The data center can be geographically near a peering point or provider junction, allowing for the high bandwidth \/ connectivity requirements<\/li>\n
- If the proposed location is too far away from an existing colo\/peering point or junction, obtaining fully-redundant, high-bandwidth access may be challenging, and may require that the provider “back haul” a fiber-optic circuit, or preferably multiple fiber-optic circuits from their closest junction to the data center’s location.\u00a0 The longer the back-haul, the more it’s going to cost.\u00a0 And the same is true for each provider you add to the data center.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n
- Local \/ City \/ State zoning, permits, and regulations.<\/li>\n
- A data center should be built on a larger piece of land, compared to other commercial real-estate, because you need room for other logistical considerations:\n