Irrespective of the company or organizations size most priced assets is data. A data loss can harm your company to a great extent. A data failure can happen by failure of a hard disk, operating mistakes, virus or natural disasters. Best option to make your data safe is offsite backup. Its more affordable and simple as compared to customary tape backup solution. Although tape backup is also used by many organization but there are many disadvantages associated with it. First of investment required for tape backup is high and also you will need internal staff for maintenance and operate. Tape backup is really bad in the situations when key data is to be recovered swiftly. Particular software installed on the computer selects the data which requires backup. Compression of the data and all the internet connections to the internet are also managed by the software. All this process is done before data is transferred to the data centers. Data can be accessed at any point of time with the help of software agents. Advantages of offsite backup includes:
Efficient
- Installation is so simple and fast that even non-technical staff can install it within minutes.
- There is no necessity of recovering lost data.
- You don’t have to wait for the right tape.
Consistency
- To guarantee protection take as many backups you want
- Files which are lost can be recovered easily and instantly also downtime is negligible.
- Conveniently works with laptops, PCs and even file servers
Inexpensive
- Free from capital expenses and all what you have to pay for is fixed monthly fees.
- No common fees are included like operating, setup and tape storage charges are also not included
In 21st century power is the fourth essential to humans after Water, Air and food. Specially for data centers power is like oxygen. Power is the main factor in a colocation facility which determines 100% uptime guarantee. Any problems in power supply can harm your hardware like memory, hard drives motherboards which will result in downtime for your data center. Downtime is a like a black mark on a Data Centers profile. Many colocation facilities promise that they have the best and suitable power systems but according to a study only 5% of the total colocation services facilities in the world have right power system. Remaining 95% have some kind of problems related to power systems. Four of the most common power related problems in data centers are:
Non-redundant UPSs
During power cuts UPS are required until generator comes online. When UPS do not go online in the case of any power failure it can cost downtime. Quality of a UPS is not the only solution for this problem even best quality UPS fail sometime, its better to have multiple redundant UPS units at your colocation facility in a n+1 configuration. In easy words this explains that a UPS runs satisfactorily below capacity in order to maintain a whole unit.
Weak Power Networks
All the UPSs and Power Distribution Units (PDU) should be designed like that if power grid fails in Colocation facility they should counterbalance it. Best Colocation facilities with good quality power grids connect their customers to various grids, so that if one goes offline other starts to work. Like this networks will always work without any disruptions. Even if one goes down other will start working like that the network will never go down.
Inadequate Generator Supply
Generators act in case of power cut. To provide the sufficient power to the whole facility a generator should be 1.5 time of the total power needed by the building. Ideal colocation facilities have a backup generator, in any case if the primary generator goes down other will start working. Without proper generators and backup power supply life of colocation services at a colocation facility will suffer. Capacity and Redundancy should be described by a good power system. a good power system is the one which have both Capacity and Redundancy.
Switch Failures
Mechanical Switches are the most common switch type in data centers. These are not good circuit breakers which are used to switch power from main electricity supply to generator supply. Switches are the most common part where there are chances of any failures.
