Redundancy is crucial to modern data centers, essential for ensuring high availability and reliability of services. Redundancy means that multiple installations are provided for all critical components, such as power supply, climate control, connectivity, monitoring, security, and backups. This is necessary to guarantee continuity for our customers.
Redundancy offers our customers indispensable assurance. Firstly, it increases reliability: systems continue to function despite possible failures or interruptions. Additionally, it improves availability: data center services stay active, even during maintenance or component failures. This helps mitigate risks and is crucial for business-critical applications and the uptime of our data centers.
At LCL, redundancy is visible, among other areas, in our independent power circuits. We always provide A and B supplies, fully separated. This ensures devices remain functional even if one supply fails. Further support for these power circuits comes from redundant UPS systems and emergency generators in case of a power outage.
The cooling systems in our data centers have double capacity with independent units, preventing a failure in one unit from impacting customer operations. The same applies to security systems (including fire suppression systems, physical and digital security) and system monitoring. It's our core business to ensure everything runs safely and optimally for our customers, making redundancy essential.
Additionally, our connectivity options are designed with redundant entry points throughout the building. There are no single points of failure, or intersections where both redundant lines cross. We also have two redundant meet-me rooms, which are fully independent of each other.
LCL Brussels-North is a Tier 3 data center, certified by IBM, meaning our data center is 'concurrently maintainable.' Additionally, LCL Brussels-West 2 is Tier III certified by the Uptime Institute, meaning both the design and implementation meet their stringent standards. The future expansion of LCL Brussels-North has also achieved the Tier III certification for its design. For both Tier 3 and Tier III certificates, redundancy is crucial, allowing for maintenance cycles to be managed without affecting the continuity of data center services provided by the servers. As part of our reliability protocol, LCL conducts generator tests every month, more frequently than many other data centers.
A specific aspect of redundancy are patches or cross-connects, physical connections between a telecom operator and the customer. We’ve already mentioned that our meet-me rooms, where customers and carriers meet, are redundant. From the meet-me room, cross-connects connect to various racks, cages, or suites in the data center where end customers have their equipment. Customers can opt for redundant structured cabling or connectivity cabling to both meet-me rooms.
Why do we recommend structured cabling for cross-connects in both meet-me rooms? This way, customers can set up redundant cross-connects. This backup ensures that if a connection in one part of the data center fails, an alternative connection is available, ensuring service continuity. This is especially important for companies whose end customers have 24/7 access to their services. This reduces the risk of connectivity loss immensely.
Redundancy is not a luxury but a necessity in modern data centers, with benefits for reliability and availability crucial for business-critical operations. The redundancy of patches plays a key role in ensuring the continuity of connectivity.
Do you have any questions about the redundancy of our critical installations or cross-connects? Contact our service delivery team here: [email protected].
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