Data Centre Audits: What’s the Difference?

There are numerous things to “audit” inside a data center in order to keep it operating at peak performance. When your team starts talking about a data center audit, make sure you know your options.

Depending on your goals, and what you hope to accomplish, there are several varieties of data center audits that be conducted. Here is a summary of the most common, and what types of information they can uncover.

Security Audit

A data center audit focusing on physical security will document and ensure that the appropriate procedures and technology are in place to avoid downtime, disasters, unauthorized access and breaches. It will revolve around things like:

In addition to analysing current security processes, a security audit can also provide you with improvement recommendations.

Energy Efficiency/Power Audit

A data center energy efficiency audit helps you pinpoint potential ways to reduce energy usage and utility bills. By taking a close look at power use, the thermal environment and lighting levels, an energy audit can uncover things such as malfunctioning equipment, incorrect HVAC settings and lights being left on in unused/unoccupied spaces.

During a data center audit that focuses on energy efficiency, power usage effectiveness (PUE) can also be calculated (based on dividing total power usage by IT equipment power). By tracking this number, you can establish benchmarks and determine whether data center performance is improving or declining over time.

 

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DCIM/AIM Webinar – 24th Jan 11AM SAST

DCIM/AIM Software & Hardware Solution – Belden PatchPro®

24th January @ 11am SAST (South African Standard Time)

Join Wolfgang Schröder and Christos Birbilis from Belden to learn more about PatchPro®, Belden Data Centre Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software and Automated Infrastructure Management (AIM) hardware solutions.

PatchPro®Infrastructure DCIM/AIM solution works with PatchPro® hardware to achieve transparency and accuracy in complex, demanding environments. Adapting to any environment – small businesses, large enterprises or sophisticated data centers – PatchPro®I modular architecture allows you to license only the components you need.

Licensing is based on concurrent users, allowing you to install the software on as many workstations as you like – and allows you to grow in the future. It can also be adapted to your specific requirements without programming or expensive consulting.

With PatchPro®, you can:

  • Monitor vital systems for early recognition of potential bottlenecks, such as hotspots, excessive power usage and other critical conditions that could impact business continuity
  • Minimize the effort required to prepare for assessments, delivering data and documents to auditors for a fast signoff
  • Extract business-critical, real-time data from your network and display it in tables, charts or combined dashboards
  • Make sure existing data center capacity is utilized before investing in an expansion
  • Support any topology (star, ring, bus or mashed network structures) or any voltage (low-, medium- or high-voltage [230 V, 400 V, 500 V])
  • Integrate air conditioning, alerting, fire and intrusion detection, facility management and IT server monitoring systems

More than 2150 Clients Worldwide

Core Business:

  • Development, Distribution and Services of, Technical Software (PatchPro® DCIM-AIM)“
  • Building Information Systems, “BIS”
  • Including Cable Management and IT-Network Planning & Documentation (DCIM / AIM)

Better, Faster, Cheaper Ethernet: The Road From 100G to 800G

Worldwide IP traffic has been increasing immensely in the enterprise and consumer division, driven by growing numbers of Internet users, as well as growing numbers of connected devices that provide faster wireless and fixed broadband access, high-quality video streaming and social networking capabilities.

Data centers are expanding globally to support computing, storage and content delivery services for enterprise and consumer users. With higher operation efficiency (CPU usage), higher scalability, lower costs and lower power consumption per workload, cloud data centers will process 92% of overall data center workloads by 2020; the remaining 8% of the workload will be processed by traditional data centers.

According to the Cisco Global Cloud Index 2015-2020, hyperscale data centers will grow from 259 in 2015 to 485 by 2020, representing 47% of all installed data center servers.

Cisco Global Cloud Index

Source: Cisco

Global annual data center traffic will grow from 6.5 ZB (zettabytes) in 2016 to 15.3 ZB by 2020. The majority of traffic will be generated in cloud data centers; most traffic will occur within the data center.

When it comes to supporting cloud business growth, higher performance and more competitive services for the enterprise (computing and collaboration) and consumers (video streaming and social networking), common cloud data center challenges include:

  • Cost efficiency
  • Port density
  • Power density
  • Product availability
  • Reach limit
  • Resilience (disaster recovery)
  • Sustainability
  • System scalability

This is the first in a series of seven blogs that will appear throughout the rest of 2017; in this series, we’ll walk you down the road to 800G Ethernet. Here, we take a close look at Ethernet generations and when they have (or will) come into play.

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Ethernet Switch Evolution: High Speed Interfaces

Technology development has always been driven by emerging applications: big data, Internet of Things, machine learning, public and private clouds, augmented reality, 800G Ethernet, etc.

Merchant Silicon switch ASIC chip development is an excellent example of that golden rule.

 

OIF’s Common Electrical Interface Development

The Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) is the standards body – a nonprofit industry organization – that develops common electrical interfaces (CEIs) for next-generation technology to ensure component and system interoperability.

The organization develops and promotes implementation agreements (IAs), offering principal design and deployment guidance for a SerDes (serializer-deserializer), including:

  • CEI-6G (which specifies the transmitter, receiver and interconnect channel associated with 6+ Gbps interfaces)
  • CEI-11G (which specifies the transmitter, receiver and interconnect channel associated with 11+ Gbps interfaces)
  • CEI-28G (which specifies the transmitter, receiver and interconnect channel associated with 28+ Gbps interfaces)
  • CEI-56G (which specifies the transmitter, receiver and interconnect channel associated with 56+ Gbps interfaces)

OIF’s CEI specifications are developed for different electrical interconnect reaches and applications to ensure system service and connectivity interoperability at the physical level:

  • USR: Ultra-short reach, for < 10 mm die to optical engine within a multi-chip module (MCM) package.
  • XSR: Extremely short reach, for < 50 mm chip to nearby optical engine (mid-board optics); or CPU to CPU/DSP arrays/memory stack with high-speed SerDes.
  • VSR: Very short reach, < 30 cm chip (e.g. switch chip) to module (edge pluggable cage, such as SFP+, QSFP+, QSFP-DD, OSFP, etc.).

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