Enterprise Data Center Design and Methodology

System Availability Profiles

Companies with lower access considerations (businesses that aren't open all hours, such as retail chain stores) might have fewer availability requirements than, for example, businesses that do national banking, government agencies, and the health care industry. The availability needs of the data center equipment should be determined in the project scope. Knowing which devices, or groups of devices, are mission-critical (needed 24×7×365) and which devices are in any availability level below mission-critical is important in determining many aspects of data center design, primarily system redundancies. These include:

• Device redundancies. The number of backup devices that must be available in the event of equipment failures. ...