{"id":14776,"date":"2019-03-06T11:00:15","date_gmt":"2019-03-06T19:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2019\/03\/06\/news-8525\/"},"modified":"2019-03-06T11:00:15","modified_gmt":"2019-03-06T19:00:15","slug":"news-8525","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2019\/03\/06\/news-8525\/","title":{"rendered":"OSDA – A More Flexible Data Center Availability Rating System"},"content":{"rendered":"

Credit to Author: Wendy Torell| Date: Wed, 06 Mar 2019 16:00:00 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n

Digitization is driving the need for increased resiliency across data center architectures, from cloud-based data centers to the edge. I co-authored a white paper<\/a> a couple of years back focused on this very topic. But what does it mean to be resilient? How do I ensure my business processes remain available? In the past, most would turn to the various existing tier or criticality methods to assess a data center or design a new data center to the required availability level.<\/p>\n

About 2 \u00bd years ago, The Green Grid<\/a> saw an opportunity to build on these methods, not only to contemplate traditional redundancy and availability approaches, but to also consider the impact to availability by innovative and sustainable energy. I have had the privilege of participating in the workgroup that collaborated on an open standard for data center availability, called OSDA<\/a>. The output of this workgroup resulted in an online tool assessing availability levels. It is a work-in-progress as it focuses mainly on the electrical infrastructure right now, but even in its current state, can offer some interesting guidance.<\/p>\n

Limitations of Availability Ratings Prompted a New Approach<\/h2>\n

Most data center designers and operators are familiar with the common availability or tier ratings that exist on a scale of 1 to 4. In fact, my colleague Victor Avelar wrote a white paper several years back on Specifying Data Center Criticality \/ Tier Levels<\/a>, where he analyzed different existing tier methods and proposed a criticality spec. The organizations that pioneered these rating systems were instrumental in providing the data center industry with a reference for how to classify data center designs (basic non-redundant, basic redundant, concurrent maintainable, and fault tolerant). These are still the go-to standard in evaluating detailed designs and obtaining 3rd party certifications. But do these methods fall short as we look at new ways to include sustainable energy in data center design<\/a>? These approaches:<\/p>\n