March 25, 2011 at 1:45 PM

When an unplanned, cataclysmic event occurs, data center managers around the world no doubt question themselves over and over again about how well they’ve prepared their operations for survivability.

 Naturally, this month’s devastation in Japan has turned the attention toward earthquake-preparedness, says Mickey Zandi, managing director at SunGard Availability Services. “Companies want to know how to secure the facility not only from a building and structural point of view but also coming from the perspective of the actual data center and the elements in it,” he says.

 In a recent IT Counterpoint interview, Zandi, an internationally recognized expert in data center design and architecture, shared his advice.

 And that always starts with this, no matter what type of event – earthquake, flood, tornado or beyond, he says: “Data center managers have to understand what’s in the current center and how they classify and protect mission-critical activities in general.”

Most important is assuring you can get data out of a site as quickly as possible. “You want the ability to shift mission-critical traffic as the event takes place, is about to take place or you feel it’s about to take place,” he says.

 For this, data center managers increasingly rely on network-aware, optimized and automated systems that can shift active traffic from one center to another. “If you haven’t already, you’ve got to move to an active-active environment, with two production data centers backing each other up and either a third disaster recovery center or a cloud-based solution that covers the two production operations,” Zandi says.

 Cloud-based disaster recovery is small today but growing, he adds. “In North America, it’ll be the next big thing, per say.”

 Once data center managers have determined how best to assure continuous operations, then they can get to more tactical elements. In the case of companies in earthquake zones, those tactical decisions would be around how to secure an operational center against seismic activity, he says.

 If you’ve got the opportunity to build from scratch, placing your data center somewhere outside of Las Vegas gets you in the safest zone in the United States in terms of probability of natural disaster, Zandi says. Also, use a base isolation system so the building “rolls” on the foundation in the case of ground movement, he adds.

 “With base isolation, you provide yourself flexibility in the building so as the event takes place, you’re able to release energy coming from the quake and the walls won't come crashing down,” he says.

 But more often than not, as Zandi points out, data center managers will be updating existing facilities with earthquake protections, not building anew.

 For existing structures, data center managers should consider incorporating energy dissipation devices, such as dampers, at strategic points throughout the building. Dampers, which essentially act like a vehicle’s shock absorbers, can help prevent walls, beams and columns from falling in during a quake, he says.

 The same types of technique as base isolation should come into play in the data center operation itself, Zandi says. “There are many solutions out there that will secure racks, servers, desktops and components inside the data center and enable them to withstand that same energy, give them elasticity to move left and right during the activity, and stop them from falling."

Beth Schultz

Beth Schultz , contributing editor, has more than two decades of experience as an IT writer and editor. You can find her work at a number of leading IT publications, where she writes on a variety of topics including cloud computing, mobility, network/systems management and security. Find her Linkedin profile here or e-mail her here.