IPD Data Centre

IT, within IT!

Our in-​house IT epit­o­mises high-​performance power in the Hanseatic City of Ham­burg. This trade arti­cle pro­vides an insight into our IPD data cen­tre.

We preach the impor­tance of back-​ups, data secu­rity and redun­dan­cies to our cus­tomers – but how does the IT in our own IT sys­tems house stand up to scrutiny? The fol­low­ing arti­cle gives you a glimpse behind the scenes. But don’t worry – we won’t bom­bard you with lots of tech­ni­cal terms!

As at your own com­pany, the hard dri­ves, net­work cables (glass fibre and cop­per) and out­lets in our data cen­tre are inter­linked, to cre­ate an IT infra­struc­ture which pro­vides both inter­nal IT and also cus­tomer plat­forms. Within our state-​of-​the art cer­ti­fied data cen­tre, we oper­ate Skype for Busi­ness, Exchange, Share­Point and Office appli­ca­tions for our employ­ees. Our cus­tomer plat­forms for IPD NOW and other instant cloud solu­tions also run in an excel­lent, sta­ble and fail-​safe way. Both the pri­mary data cen­tre and also the back-​up data cen­tre (geo-​redundant) are equipped with:

• Power sup­ply (UPS sys­tems, emer­gency power sup­ply)
• Fire pro­tec­tion (auto­matic fire extin­guish­ing sys­tem with N2 extin­guish­ing gas, fire and smoke flaps)
• Cli­mate con­trol (cool­ing sys­tem, dust pro­tec­tion, air humid­ity val­ues)

Reg­u­lar secu­rity checks and func­tion tests are stan­dard in the IPD data cen­tre, as are a secu­rity area and video mon­i­tor­ing, an intruder alarm sys­tem, access con­trol and access log­ging via PIN.

This was con­firmed in an in-​house inter­view with one of our many IT experts, Mr Sven Fast: “The data cen­tre offers exactly what has already been described. More pre­cisely, we per­ma­nently mon­i­tor our servers and, cru­cially, all net­work com­po­nents for packet run­times, packet losses, rout­ing pro­to­cols, band­width util­i­sa­tion, etc. This encap­su­lates our IT mon­i­tor­ing. I would also add that I believe it’s good for IP Dynam­ics to show its com­mit­ment to the envi­ron­ment through its use of green elec­tric­ity!”

Finally, a few hard facts for those who are inter­ested!

IT– Com­po­nents and Descrip­tion:

Pro­tec­tion level:

• Qual­ity lev­els: tier 2+/tier 4 (depend­ing on area in data cen­tre)

Glass fibre con­nec­tion:

• Sep­a­rate feed of the glass fibres.
• Car­rier han­dover points in the meet-​me-​rack.
• Glass fibre type: sin­gle or mul­ti­mode. All glass fibre con­nec­tor types.
• Glass fibre back-​up con­nec­tion between the data cen­tres, band­width 100 Mbit/​s.
• The band­width can be extended to 1 Gbit/​s.

Net­work cable:

• Con­nec­tion between net­work com­po­nents and servers: net-​work cable type Cat.6a (RJ45 con­nec­tor type).
• Inter­nal cabling between the floors in the data cen­tre: net­work cable type Cat. 7 (RJ45 con­nec­tor type).

Server and hard dri­ves:

• Man­u­fac­turer Lenovo.

Fire­walls:

• Data-​protection-​compliant fire­walls (type 1 and 2).

Lap­top and tele­phone at the work­sta­tion, IPD data cen­tre in the back­ground – this is how we imple­ment IT projects of all mag­ni­tudes, from ini­tial con­sul­ta­tion, plan­ning, and acqui­si­tion of new hard­ware and soft­ware through to com­mis­sion­ing and sup­port. And via the man­aged ser­vice (24/​7, 365 days a year).

Inter­ested? The fol­low­ing stan­dards and cer­ti­fi­ca­tions apply to our IPD data cen­tre:

• ISO/​IEC 27001:2013 “Data cen­tre and all tech­ni­cal ser­vices” (cer­ti­fi­ca­tions)
• Trusted Site Infra­struc­ture TSI V3.2 Level 3 (extended) (cer­ti­fi­ca­tion)
• Elec­tri­cal instal­la­tion in accor­dance with DIN stan­dards and VDE reg­u­la­tions
• BDSG Fed­eral Data Pro­tec­tion Act (data pro­tec­tion and IT secu­rity in accor­dance with the BDSG)

Links and sources: www​.iphh​.net.

Did you find some of the tech­ni­cal jar­gon a lit­tle tricky after all? If so, go to IP Dynam­ics Knowl­edge.