Power Protection FEATURED ARTICLE

Data and applications are valuable information to companies of all sizes; without them, all operations stop, hence, they must be protected at all costs. Meanwhile, natural disasters, malicious acts or simple human errors can result in data center failures, ultimately resulting in data loss. Therefore, it is not surprising to know that data protection and disaster recovery (DR) planning are key items today on a data center manager’s agenda. As a result, building resilient data center infrastructures should be a critical component of their responsibilities.

 A recent IDG Research Service report, “Quick Poll: Disaster Recovery Trends and Metrics,” published in the Data Center Journal indicates that the majority of companies cannot tolerate outages longer than four hours.

While there are many simple solutions to protect data (as well recover it after post-disaster), providing solutions for an entire infrastructure can be challenging. According to an article by Darrell Riddle, senior director of product marketing for Software, “These challenges are due to the growing amounts of data, hybrid environments, and limited budgets and staff.”

No matter what, data center managers cannot avoid these solutions because they are the data center’s insurance policy.

In this article, the author suggests that by continuous replication of data via snapshots of the data to a local disaster recovery site, data center managers can rest assured that if a power outage were to occur, the most recent copy of data is protected and saved for recovery operations within minutes. In fact, as per the article, “continuous data protection moves a company from periodic backups to an always-backed-up paradigm, which means little to no data loss.”

With regards to DR, the article says that disaster recovery planning is more than just backing up the data or making a copy of it through continuous data protection. In essence, wrote Riddle, “effective disaster recovery combines applications, databases and data into one data center service offering.” And the reason given is simple; if the data is restored but the application on which it resides is unavailable, the data is useless. “Data center managers must look at DR from an IT services point of view,” he adds.

According to Riddle, companies are addressing these issues by turning to replication and automated technologies for DR. As explained, automated DR takes these complex steps and automates them, understanding the specific order, process and procedure for each aspect of bringing back the applications and data.

Meanwhile, data center equipment safety standards have been developed to ensure uptime, network and human safety, and manufacturers must comply with them before shipping the product. One such safety standard, which is beginning to make an impact on design and implementation of IT equipment in the data center, is UL 60950-1.

Minuteman UPS/Para Systems (News - Alert), a manufacturer of a variety of power technology products, offers a full line of vertical, horizontal, amp-metered and non-amp-metered power distribution units (PDUs) in various amperages that are UL-60950-1 listed.

To learn more about Minuteman’s offerings, visit www.minutemanups.com.