SMB Closet Servers

Many of the small and medium businesses that I have worked with in the past have shown me their “data center” or server room. More often than not, this is a small closet somewhere out of the way or a copy room. These rooms have very poor climate control if any with ceiling panels popped out using house fans for circulation and either no fire suppression or the rack sits right under a ceiling sprinkler head. Some customers know that this isn’t the greatest design and others just aren’t aware of the risks they are taking. I cringe when I have to go visit these customers as I know what data loss could do to these businesses. The statistics are astounding as seen below.

• 93% of companies that lost their data center for 10 days or more due to a disaster, filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster. 50% of businesses that found themselves without data management for this same time period filed for bankruptcy immediately. (National Archives & Records Administration in Washington)
• 94% of companies suffering from a catastrophic data loss do not survive – 43% never reopen and 51% close within two years. (University of Texas)
• 30% of all businesses that have a major fire go out of business within a year and 70% fail within five years. (Home Office Computing Magazine)
• 77% of those companies who do test their tape backups found back-up failures. (Boston Computing Network, Data Loss Statistics)
• 7 out of 10 small firms that experience a major data loss go out of business within a year. (DTI/Price waterhouse Coopers)
• 96% of all business workstations are not being backed up. (Contingency Planning and Strategic Research Corporation)
• 50% of all tape backups fail to restore. (Gartner)
• 25% of all PC users suffer from data loss each year (Gartner)*

The most common cause of data loss is hardware failure which in recent studies calculates this at between 40-46%. Hardware failures are even more common in environments that aren’t ideal for computing conditions. Cool temperatures found in most independently controlled data centers can cause issues due to low humidity as well as micro fractures within the silicon of the processor. Excessive heat of housing servers in closets can be just as damaging since they have to work harder to remain cool and utilize more power to do so which in turn generates even more heat.
We know some of the environmental conditions that can cause issues with our servers now, but how can this be prevented? A data center is the right choice to house your critical infrastructure since security, humidity, temperature, and power are all regulated and monitored 24/7 which can help cut down but not eliminate hardware failure. You can use a data center to co-locate your equipment or house redundant equipment for your disaster recovery plan.

There are many human related reasons as well for data loss. Most of these data loss issues can be resolved by utilizing a solid backup strategy. A good backup strategy involves getting your data off-site to a secure location. Utilizing a cloud based solution is becoming more common as costs are declining in storage and bandwidth. A disk to disk to cloud solution is an optimal solution since you would have a localized backup for faster restores while an off-site copy is available in the event of a catastrophic loss.

Enseva is a purpose built data center that is designed to minimize the risks of hardware failure as well as offering cloud based solutions. We have co-location services to host your hardware or utilize our private cloud infrastructure to spin up a server or servers to meet your demands. We also offer a full cloud based backup solution with an option for an onsite NAS for faster recovery times.
To learn more about these exciting offers, please contact sales@enseva.com

*statistics pulled from article 7 Steps to Lose Your Data and Probably Your Job