Insight from Navisite

ANDOVER, Mass. -- If you're an enterprise data center manager, saving money on power and cooling plays a role in your company's bottom line. But if you're a data center hosting company, reducing data center costs is your bottom line.

The new green: Data centers go au naturale

That's the situation at Navisite in Andover, Mass., where data center Vice President Bob Stephens is charged with wringing every nickel he can out of the company's 52,000-square-foot facility.

At the same time, Stephens can't exactly scrimp on the basics. He has to make sure that the data center has state-of-the art fire suppression, redundant WAN links, and backup power to assure continuous operation in the event of a power outage or other type of emergency.

After all, a failure to meet service-level agreements for uptime could result in penalties that no hosting company wants to absorb.

To that end, the Navisite data center has a number of important safety, security and redundancy features:

1. The building has a slab-on-grade concrete floor, with a raised area in the data center 24-inches higher than the slab. That's pretty typical. But the foundation was designed with an additional concrete perimeter wall between 24-inches and 30-inches above grade, which acts to keep moisture out in the event of seasonal flooding from things like snow drifts.

2. To make sure that WAN connections don't go down, the data center has four OC-48, self-healing SONET rings. The data center also has its own Class B IP addresses and full BGP routing.

3. Fire in a data center is a bad thing under any circumstances, but even worse if you're hosting somebody else's racks of servers. Navisite's data center has sophisticated smoke and heat detectors designed to fight fires without destroying the computer equipment.

The system has multiple parts. First, there's a sophisticated set of detectors that signal an alarm when burning particles are detected in the air. The second line of defense is a system that uses FM-200, a colorless, odorless gas to attack a fire. The last resort is what's called a dry-pipe fire suppression system. Instead of having water sitting in the pipes, which could result in leaks that might damage the data center equipment, Navisite uses a "dry-pipe" system. The pipes are filled with compressed air. Water only fills the pipes once a sprinkler head goes off.

4. Because the main source of data center fires is electrical short circuits, Stephens says his team does periodic checks of all electrical connections, using infrared cameras.

5. Navisite uses two-factor authentication to protect the data center. Anybody entering the data center needs to swipe a card and pass a sophisticated palm scanner. Of course, there is also a security guard at the front desk, keeping an eye on that data center door.

6. For emergency power, Stephens has an entire room full of batteries at the ready. In case of an outage, the batteries would immediately kick in and keep the whole site running for around 15 minutes. That's plenty of time for the backup generators to take over.