Stuck With You, But Don’t Want To: Avoiding Cramped Data Centers By Saleh Tousi At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

When it comes to hosting your servers, the number of other servers located in the facility is a very important consideration. Some people find themselves being in the position of having started hosting at a data center when it was brand new and not many people knew about it yet. Then, as time went on, the data center began to fill up. But with more servers in the data center, this also created more problems. If you stayed with your data center, watching it fill up and are fed up with the problems that a cramped and over-crowded data center brings, or if you're looking for a colocation facility for the first time, it's imperative that you know the risks involved with hosting in a crowded facility.

Pulling your Plug

With so many servers hosted in one area, it can be hard to tell which plug goes to which server. Tangles are never easy to navigate, especially for novice technicians and people with little experience in the industry. Even the seasoned professional might not be able to get through the mess of chords. Regardless of whether you're confident in your own abilities, you can't count on other people to always be precise. Accidents happen all too frequently, and if someone accidentally pulls the plug on your server instead of theirs, it spells disaster.

Power Outages

More servers mean more power being used. With so many servers filling up the outlets, it's more likely that there's going to be a power-outage. Even when a data center has redundancies and power-generators, frequent power-outages are not something you want to have happen. The more the power goes out, the more likely it becomes that the generator will fail or other associated problems will occur.

Over-heating

Servers generate heat. There's no denying that. The more servers you have, the more air conditioning you need to pump into the data center to compensate for the heat generated. But air-conditioning has its limits. Even with the AC on full-blast all the time, it won't necessarily counter the heat generated in a cramped data center.

Scary to Navigate

Crowded data centers mean lots of racks and lots of servers. But it's not like there are wide hallways between each row. Rather, racks are placed close together and the aisles in between are small, at best. Knocking down other people's servers is a major concern in this situation. If you accidentally knock over someone else's server, you could be responsible for repairing the damage or replacing the entire server. The reverse is also possible. If someone bumps into your sever and inadvertently pulls out a chord or knocks it to the ground, you could be down for a long time until someone notices. This, of course, could be detrimental to your business if your server is down for long enough.

Hot Pockets

Cooling systems in data centers are not always even. When there is too much air coming out of one server, the AC will kick in at that spot in order to cool down the rack. However, this creates a problem for other servers- there’s not enough air conditioning to go around, leaving certain areas of the data center without any cooling at all. If your server happens to be located in one these hot pockets, it could overheat. And unfortunately, there's no way to tell where one of these hot pockets is going to occur.

Security

Large and overcrowded data centers are open to a host of security breaches. With so many customers going in and out on a daily basis, it's easy for the wrong person to enter the data center. In fact, it's happened before. In one such data center, someone came into the data and stole expensive components out of someone else's server. No one in the facility thought a thing of it because they just assumed that the person was a customer working on their server. It was later discovered that this was not the case and that he had in fact stolen parts of the server.

It's easy to avoid these and other problems that could arise from hosting at a crowded data center. Switching to a newer facility that hasn't filled up yet is the best way to prevent these problems. Newer and more spacious data centers automatically eliminate these problems, giving you peace of mind that your servers are always safe and free from the hazards of over-crowded data centers.

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