What is Data Center Operations?
Be it Magento, WordPress, CraftCMS, or anything in between, your application needs reliability. It is our job in Data Center Operations (DCO) to make that a reality. The DCO team works around the clock to ensure our data centers and your websites remain online.
What is Data Center Operations?
The DCO team deals with infrastructure, security, power and cooling, and management. We build out and maintain server racks, monitor building security during non-business hours, actively monitor power and cooling systems to ensure they stay online, and perform maintenance on the servers that host your website.
The Equipment We Use
In DCO, we pay close attention to the status of every piece of equipment; from the Dell PowerEdge servers powering the thousands of websites we host, to the HVAC equipment cooling the data center. We’re able to keep track of everything with the help of our monitoring systems. These systems actively watch a large array of sensors, which alert us to potential or active issues as soon as they appear. Upon receiving an alert, the DCO team immediately takes action to resolve these issues.
In our servers, we also utilize a technology known as RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks). RAID helps us ensure that our clients’ data remains safe and intact. RAID allows us to replace faulty hard disk and solid state drives without any noticeable impact to our clients. For the most part, our clients will never even know anything has changed with their environment following a replacement.
Minimizing Downtime
While many of the issues we see are simple to resolve, others require careful planning and execution to avoid major website outages. Our monitoring systems help by providing early notification of problems. In most cases, we are able to reach out to clients to schedule downtime as a result. This allows for your website to be taken offline at a time that is least impacting to you while resolving the issues that could cause bigger problems in the future.
However, downtime can sometimes strike without warning. That’s why we keep a sufficient stock of equipment on hand to complete replacements as needed, ensuring that no client is left offline for an extended period of time.
We are able to immediately act on issues thanks to our monitoring systems, but we still ensure that each server is backed up to an off-site location on a daily basis. As a wise person once said:
It is better to have something and not need it, than to need something and not have it.
In the event our team needs to utilize these backups to restore a server to service after a catastrophic failure, we have the ability to bring a server back from the dead in a matter of hours.
Most of what we do goes unnoticed, but the DCO team plays a pivotal role in ensuring your websites remain online and stable for visitors. Without the hardware that we maintain, we would be unable to run the necessary software to ensure that your website provides the best experience possible to your visitors.
About the Authors
Nathan is a Data Center Technician with the DCO team at Hostdedi. He enjoys working with clients to help give them the right hardware needed for the best website experience possible. He also enjoys traveling and is an avid fan of the Ohio State Buckeyes.
Alan Cutshall is a Tier 2 Data Center Operations Technician at Hostdedi. He currently attends Western Governors University in pursuit of a Bachelors of Science in Network Operations and Security. Computers have been a life-long fascination of his. Throughout his time with Hostdedi, he’s been provided with countless opportunities to deploy, configure, and troubleshoot some of the latest and greatest hardware the market has to offer. The opportunities he’s been afforded have not only furthered his fascination with computers, but also taught him things he’s been able to translate to both his studies and his hobby equipment back at home.
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