What are mission-critical data centers?: powering digital transformation

Mission-critical data centers are emerging as a key ally for the digital economy, guaranteeing uninterrupted operations in an “always-on” world.

In a context where continuous access to digital data is increasingly critical for both business and security reasons, data center downtime scenarios represent major liabilities with serious consequences: from massive financial losses to irreparable reputational damage. 

The total volume of worldwide data is now calculated to reach 394 zettabytes by 2028. As data growth forecasts continue escalating, data centers provide the physical infrastructure to make the digital economy a reality.

Mission-critical infrastructure comes in to enable this by reducing the risk of downtime and the potential economic and social disruptions that can ensue.

Ready to step up when other systems fail, mission-critical data centers are built specifically for resilience, with failover systems and redundancy design particularities coming together to ensure operation during crisis scenarios.

But what exactly makes mission-critical infrastructure so vital? What particular design considerations set them apart from standard data centers? And how are they expected to evolve in the coming years? Let's take a look.

What is a mission-critical data center? 

A mission-critical data center is a facility designed to host IT systems essential to maintain core operations.

As such, its goal is to ensure uninterrupted availability and protection of the data it contains at all times, including during events like power outages, fires, cyberattacks or natural disasters.

As we see below in this article, mission-critical infrastructure can be particularly important to essential operations such as those carried out by banks, hospitals, airlines, telecom providers, government agencies or large industrial players. 

Key features of a mission-critical data center

Building a mission-critical data center requires applying distinct design principles compared to those of standard facilities. 

The process integrates engineering, security, sustainability, and long-term vision with the aim of generating a resilient ecosystem for data. 

This involves a series of design decisions around strategic factors such as location (considering climate,  seismic risk, energy availability, connectivity…) and energy efficiency (so that uptime requirements are balanced with responsible energy use), among other things.

Taking these into consideration, the following features are typically part of mission-critical data centers:

• Full redundancy: in this type of infrastructure, every critical system —from power to cooling— has a backup so that, if one component fails, another takes over without interruption. This approach seeks to eliminate single points of failure, and involves redundancy configurations that are typically N+1, N+2, or more.

• Uptime guarantee: the aim is to achieve near-perfect uptime, so that the data center guarantees uninterrupted access to IT systems. Tier III and Tier IV standards (as defined by Uptime Institute) are typical in mission-critical infrastructure, providing 99.982% and 99.995% uptime respectively (or approximately 1.6 hours and 26.3 minutes of downtime annually, respectively). 

In order to achieve this 24/7/365 availability, a series of design and operation decisions are taken including distributed architectures, uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), backup generators, and high-efficiency thermal solutions, as seen below.

• Disaster recovery: mission-critical data centers incorporate specific protocols for recovery after potential crisis or incidents, including cyberattacks or natural disasters.
  
  
• Physical and logical security measures: this may include initiatives at the physical data center such as biometric access control, video surveillance or early fire detection; as well as advanced cybersecurity and incident response protocols.

Why mission-critical infrastructure matters in a digital world

While terms like “digital” and “data” conjure images of intangible, non-physical realities, the truth is the digital economy stands on material and tangible assets: IT equipment in data centers.

As such, it’s important to understand that, as the digital world continues evolving to support more and more critical aspects of societies, the stakes of failure in data centers are also growing. 

From the healthcare sector to banking and cloud services, even brief downtime in some industries can result in major financial losses and even risks to human life. 

Today, a power outage could delay a doctor from accessing critical patient data during emergencies; a natural disaster could mean encryption of financial data is threatened; and hardware failure in a cloud data center can lead to cascading failures for many businesses, and, ultimately, important financial losses.

In this context, mission-critical servers and data centers come in to provide reliable, always-on data even during emergencies or crises, when other systems may fail.

Through dedicated, state-of-the-art data center design, these facilities prevent service interruptions. Thanks to this, they are also able to provide key services like protecting sensitive data, as well as providing clear protocols for restoring services instantly after failures. 

This, in turn, means businesses in critical sectors can operate with confidence:  knowing their operations are supported by mission-critical infrastructure, businesses are confident that they’ve taken measures to avoid costly disruptions and reputational damage that may arise from interrupted services, as well as potential compliance issues with security standards.

Core components of a mission-critical data center

Power-related components

A number of elements in mission-critical data centers are incorporated to ensure hardware and infrastructure receive electrical power continuously, thus avoiding downtime due to power loss. 

For this goal, the system must include in its design an approach where protection implies multiple layers of access to electrical power, typically including:

• PDUs: Power Distribution Units are in charge of distributing electrical power to equipment within data centers, preventing circuit failure, imbalances and generating real-time monitoring of alterations.

• Backup systems: a broad category for elements in data centers that act as auxiliary systems, which take over immediately if primary systems fail. Such is the case of UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply), which can supply power instantly in case the main source fails, while also attending to issues such as voltage and frequency stabilization. UPS provides the needed power until generators start, which are another supplementary barrier for ensuring power and which can run for longer periods of time while power is restored. 

• Failover: this term names the process that allows for the automatic and instant switching of operations to backup systems in case the main system fails. 

Data center cooling designed for maximum uptime

Data center cooling represents another key consideration to build mission-critical infrastructure, as failure in cooling equipment can affect the reliability of IT equipment and thus lead to downtime. As such, cooling can be considered one of the most critical —and often underestimated— elements in mission-critical servers, allowing for continuous operation.

Thus, careful, dedicated design considerations must be put into place into the following components: 

• HVAC: these are specialized climate control systems that are in charge of regulating temperature and humidity in data centers. In mission-critical infrastructure, HVAC is conceived as redundant units (N+1 or 2N), ensuring servers and other hardware operate in desirable environmental conditions at all times.
  
  
• Chilled water systems: in charge of removing heat by circulating chilled water, these systems provide additional support for data center cooling and HVAC operation. 
  
  
• Optimized airflow: a set of protocols that ensure control over how air moves through a data center so that undesirable thermal conditions are avoided. This includes hot aisle / cold aisle configurations, the use of fans or blanking panels, all of which act in support of HVAC and can significantly improve Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE).
  
  

Monitoring equipment

A series of components are incorporated in mission-critical data centers to continuously track their performance, providing visibility and generating alerts in case anomalies come up. 

As such, the following components act as valuable allies in this area:

• DCIM: Data Center Infrastructure Management systems provide real-time tools for monitoring and optimizing data center resources, from power connectivity to cooling and thermal management, as well as hardware equipment. In charge of both the physical and the virtual infrastructure, they offer a centralized perspective of the data center that provides operators with intelligence for decision-making. Because knowing about a problem is the first step to solve it, DCIM represents an essential asset for resilient mission-critical data centers, providing alerts of potential risks in order to avert them in time.
  
  
• Remote monitoring for predictive maintenance: a series of tools are implemented to allow for remote, real-time monitoring and management, so that issues can be solved even in unmanned data centers. Along with DCIM, these systems take a proactive approach to protecting mission-critical servers, being able to detect failure or anomalies before catastrophic events take place.

Trends and the future of mission-critical data centers

As data centers continue powering the digital economy, mission-critical infrastructure is expected to become increasingly sophisticated to meet current demands for constant availability. 

In order to do so, there are a number of movements that are anticipated to allow mission-critical infrastructure to become even more reliable and available, while also taking sustainability and cost-efficiency concerns to the forefront.

• Integration with edge computing: in edge computing, workloads are dispersed among different locations in an effort to locate data nearer to where it's consumed. As operators and computing networks become increasingly distributed in an effort to get closer to users, resiliency strategies will also see mission-critical data centers adapting to new decentralized approaches. 
  
  
• Sustainability and green energy: concerns and increasing regulation around data centers’ energy use are pushing innovation towards achieving more sustainable infrastructure. Innovation efforts are pointing towards data center solutions that are able to minimize their carbon footprints while also striking a balance with uptime and performance requirements. At the same time, the rising temperatures and extreme weather linked to climate change demand more resilient infrastructure in data centers, which in turn put an extra pressure on mission-critical data centers.

Sustainable data center cooling solutions are expected to allow for achieving greater energy efficiency and the integration of cleaner energies. This is particularly true considering the IEA figures about the share of cooling systems in total data centre consumption, which can vary “from about 7% for efficient hyperscale data centres to over 30% for less-efficient [ones].”

From free cooling initiatives to liquid cooling and immersion cooling, effective strategies in data center refrigeration are emerging that push energy efficiency to new levels. 

These efforts in thermal engineering are paired with the development of increasingly smart management systems, including the development of  AI data centers.

• The need for resilient, scalable design: with exponential data growth due to the rise of AI, 5G and edge computing, data centers are expected to service growing and more complex computing resources. The rise of the hyperscale data center can be understood as a response to this growing need. At the same time, trends in mission-critical data centers point towards building scalable and flexible designs that can accommodate rising computing demands rapidly and on an on-demand basis.

ARANER: cutting-edge cooling solutions for mission-critical data centers

As seen across the article, mission-critical data centers continue evolving to guarantee resiliency and are thus emerging as key strategic assets in digital strategies.

Considering the key role of cooling solutions for mission-critical infrastructure, at ARANER we work to become key partners for operators looking to implement secure and efficient thermal systems.

Our data center cooling solutions are at the forefront of thermal innovation in data centers. Our team of experts is ready to carefully craft solutions that meet each project’s needs  while also adapting to current sustainability and resiliency standards and regulations.

Get in touch with us to speak to our team about how we can help you.