This document provides an agenda for a workshop on data centre planning and execution. The workshop will cover an introduction to the hosting company Pharmaserv, a review of a data centre project including a fast motion video of construction, basics of building technology for IT managers such as electricity, cooling and security, standards from organizations like Uptime Institute and BITKOM, and next generation security issues involving vulnerabilities in building technology systems.
Bei den Quality Standards ist zwischen Verfügbarkeit, Energieeffizienz und Compliance zu unterscheiden.
The Idea behind free cooling is quite simple: you use the environment to cool down your equipment. It is like opening the window when it is very hot inside. That would be direct free cooling. But particles in the air could harm your equipment. This can be avoided by using heat exchangers between the inside and the outside. This is then called indirect free cooling. A way to improve efficiency are recirculating coolers which first cool down a liquid (refrigerant) which then is transported to the heat exchanger. This process might be enhanced by ventilation and evaporation.
This principle is used in most fridges. The compressed refrigerant is condensed, thus rejecting heat from the system to the environment (1). By expanding the refrigerant (2) it looses temperature (flash evaporation) and can now be used for the intended cooling purposes (3). By compressing the warmed liquid (4) the process starts anew. Relatively much energy is needed.
Clock in / clock out
Clock in / clock out
According to wiki
Ratio 8%
Not a ratio but a time frame
Usually N is the number of systems needed in the first place to fulfill a given task. Then the number of redundant systems follows after a ‘+’ sign. E.g.: a datacentre needs 120 kW cooling power and it was decided to do the cooling with 40kW units. A minimum of N=3 cooling units its needed. To compensate for the loss of one cooling unit, one redundant cooling unit is added: N+1. To compensate for the loss of all three cooling units, the same amount of cooling units would be added: N+N or 2N.
If your provider guarantees an availability of 90% for a certain system, you will not expect the system to be down 10% of the time. In fact, you will expect the system to run 100% of the time, but you will be prepared to deal with 10% downtime – in the worst case.
A year has 8,760 hours. An availability of 99.0% would mean that you had to accept a failure probability of 1.0%, resulting in a downtime of 0.01 x 8,760h = 87.6h per year, if availability is granted on an annual base. The downtime per incident is significantly reduced by negotiating a monthly base: 0.01 x 730h = 7.3h
The probability for simultaneous downtimes is calculated by multiplying the failure probability of each involved system. In case of two systems with a failure probability of 10% each, the resulting failure probability is 10% x 10% = 1%. Or, in other words: 1/10 x 1/10 = 1/100.
Other standards were created by BITKOM, ECO or TUV Rheinland. They are comparable to the Uptime model to some extend, but align better to local (i.e. European) circumstances.
Electric Supply
Modern building technology nowadays often is based on the same kind of infrastructure as IT. Even though they might not actually share the same infrastructure, building technology and IT share a lot of exploits. By applying these exploits to both building technology and IT new exploits are designed: hybrid attacks.
One of these new exploits takes advantage of the fact that some security features are only up and running after starting of the OS has finished. The attacker first hacks the building services management system and switches off electric power for a short period of time. Like mentioned above, servers are more vulnerable during powering on time and the hacker knows that all servers are powering on at this moment.
(Maintanance) Access to building services management systems is often poorly protected since there is little risk intellectual property theft. In many cases even the standard password has not be changed.
Bei den Quality Standards ist zwischen Verfügbarkeit, Energieeffizienz und Compliance zu unterscheiden.