A presentation by Steve Amolo, Lead Systems Administrator, World Vision International

1. Data Centre Best
Practices
By Steve Amolo (WorldVision) and Gilbert Okebe(Computechltd)
7th June 2017
Data Center Best Practices – NETHOPE AFRICA CHAPTER MEETING 2017

2. Data Center Best Practices – NETHOPE AFRICA CHAPTER MEETING 2017
Hardware Performance
Capacity Planning
Security
HA

3. 1. Hardware Performance
Data Center Best Practices – NETHOPE AFRICA CHAPTER MEETING 2017

4. Data Center Best Practices – NETHOPE AFRICA CHAPTER MEETING 2017
•Ever growing business computing demands.
•H/W Choice on Scale out/up approaches.
•Benchmark Testing.
•Performance Tracking.
Performance
per Watt
TCO
VS
Factors to Consider !!!!!!!!

5. 2. HA
Data Center Best Practices – NETHOPE AFRICA CHAPTER MEETING 2017

6.  Unreliable donor engagement, leading to low
fundraising.
 Loss of Reputation, loss of trust from partners.
 Slow intervention in time sensitive response
programs.
 Brand Equity.
Effects of IT services Downtime in NGOs
Data Center Best Practices – NETHOPE AFRICA CHAPTER MEETING 2017

7.  Power and Cooling, (On Premise)
 Network and cabling,
 Hardware Environment (Clustering with Virtualization)
 Virtual Environments (On Premise)
 OS and Application Services (On Premise and Cloud)
 Disaster Recovery. (On Premise and Cloud)
The HA Stack
Data Center Best Practices – NETHOPE AFRICA CHAPTER MEETING 2017

8.  Identify and eliminate SPOFs at each layer of your IT
architecture.
 Server and Application Clustering Technologies.
 Disaster Recovery Technologies.
 Specialized software configuration.
Data Center Best Practices – NETHOPE AFRICA CHAPTER MEETING 2017
Factors to Consider to Improve on HA

9. 3.Capacity Planning
Data Center Best Practices – NETHOPE AFRICA CHAPTER MEETING 2017

10.  Current peak and off-peak data center resource utilization
 Identifying the depletion and obsolescence time frame of data center
infrastructure
 Identifying data center resources that need to be increased, decreased or
replaced in the future
 Planning for the design and implementation of newer resources or capacity
changes as identified
Data Center Best Practices – NETHOPE AFRICA CHAPTER MEETING 2017
Factors to Consider for Capacity Planning

11. • What are the capabilities of your current hardware ?
• What is the anticipated growth in terms of Infrastructure?
• What would be your future Needs vis a vis technology trends ?
Data Center Best Practices – NETHOPE AFRICA CHAPTER MEETING 2017
Components to be considered for capacity planning

12. Capacity Planning Tools
Data Center Best Practices – NETHOPE AFRICA CHAPTER MEETING 2017
• Microsoft - Capacity Planner for Hyper V, MAP Toolkit
• VMWare Capacity Planner
• Solar winds Virtualization Manager

13. 4. Security
Data Center Best Practices – NETHOPE AFRICA CHAPTER MEETING 2017

14. Common Threats to Datacenters
•DoS.
•Breach of Confidential Information.
•Data theft or alteration.
•Unauthorized use of Compute
resources.
•Identity theft.
Origin of Vulnerabilities
•Implementation – Software and protocols flows,
incorrect or faulty software design, incomplete
testing, etc.
•Configuration - Elements not properly configured,
use of default, configurations.
•Design – ineffective or inadequate security design,
lack of or inappropriate implementation of
redundancy mechanisms, etc.
common source Problems:
•Exploitation of Out-of-Date software.
•Exploitation of software defaults.
Data Center Best Practices – NETHOPE AFRICA CHAPTER MEETING 2017

15. • Physical Security.
• Logical and Network Security.
• Firmware Updates and patching.
• Data Backup and Restore.
• Incident Response Plan.
• Data Security Framework
Mitigate Data Center Security Risks
Data Center Best Practices – NETHOPE AFRICA CHAPTER MEETING 2017

16. Data Center Best Practices – NETHOPE AFRICA CHAPTER MEETING 2017
Thank You