Month: November 2022

Recently a DataBank customer experienced a potentially devastating Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. This article takes a closer look at how DataBank and our cybersecurity partner Radware helped overcome the cyberattack, and more importantly, how any company can learn from this experience by taking a proactive approach to minimizing risk.

The company, a leading provider of VoIP solutions and services suffered a DDoS attack that overloaded network-based session border controllers, and ultimately, caused its entire VoIP-as-a-service system to go down.

The situation was dire. Internally, entire teams of senior staff suddenly had to drop what they were doing to triage the damage and attempt to get critical systems up and running as quickly as possible. Externally, the DDoS attack disrupted customers’ service and left them unable to communicate with the company itself. Unfortunately, both scenarios—internal chaos and outward customer impact—led to inflated costs and lost revenue. In short, the company and its customers were completely shut down — temporarily.

Fortunately, there was some good news. This company was a DataBank colocation customer, and while it was not using our portfolio of managed cybersecurity services, representatives contacted us to see if we could help. We quickly engaged our partner, Radware, a leading provider of cybersecurity services and solutions, including advanced DDoS protection. All three parties worked together—and around the clock—to assess the DDoS attack, develop the right strategy to resolve it, and put the plan into motion.

A Fast Start Pays Off

Getting a fast start was critical. Facing unhappy customers, mounting costs, and lost revenue, the VoIP company needed help quickly. DataBank and Radware received the first call on a Friday night and worked through the weekend to develop an effective response to the attack.

Radware immediately identified the networking devices and other hardware that would have to be replaced. As a Tel Aviv-based company, Radware normally experiences hardware shipments that take two to three days (if not longer). Yet, this timeframe just wasn’t an option, given the customer’s urgency. Using some creative thinking, the Radware team was able to find what it needed in Atlanta, saving crucial time. In fact, the right hardware was already ordered by Monday morning, giving the team a real advantage in overcoming the attack.

All three parties collaborated closely and worked around the clock to install the new networking hardware, develop and configure a defense port, and ensure everything was tuned properly. While the effort exhibited an “all-hands-on-deck” urgency, it also required expert-level thinking from senior technical staff to address evolving network challenges, create effective traffic filters, and make sure customer service was restored.

Finally, after the crisis was averted, DataBank and Radware developed a joint DDoS mitigation service offering that would let the company outsource this part of its cybersecurity program. It now benefits from a truly proactive partnership approach including real-time monitoring and much more effective DDoS protection.

The DataBank DDoS Difference

Ultimately, the story has a happy ending. While the company did suffer from lost productivity that translated into unplanned costs, it was able to quickly restore service to its customers. This helped the VoIP provider avoid significant revenue issues and a damaged reputation in the market.

It could have been worse, though. Even just a fast, back-of-the-envelope calculation shows how expensive these efforts can be, especially when factoring in labor and hardware costs, customer churn, broken service level agreements, and even penalties and fines. If the VoIP company had a DDoS mitigation plan and service in place at the outset, these negative consequences could have been avoided.

The story also serves as a cautionary tale when it comes to managing cybersecurity in a colocation or data center facility. Most of our customers view DataBank as a colocation partner first, and don’t realize we offer a full portfolio of managed services, including security offerings such as DDoS mitigation.

Today, DDoS attacks are some of the most debilitating threats to any company’s IT infrastructure. Successfully fending them off requires the right technology and partners such as Radware, and today, our DDoS Mitigation service gives you both.

We can help you eliminate DDoS attacks in real time, while allowing friendly, business-critical traffic to flow uninterrupted, even while under attack. Our DDoS Mitigation service includes implementation, monitoring, and management around the clock by DataBank’s security team. Most importantly, our service is designed to let you ensure your IT environment is safe and secure, so you can do what you do best: make sure your business is running smoothly. To learn more about DataBank’s managed security services, please visit our website or contact us. To learn more about Radware, please visit https://www.radware.com or contact them today.

One thing is clear: The demand for computing power will continue to increase as companies in all industries look to meet their customers’ expectations through more innovative application of digital technology. This has real implications, not just for the technology in use, but for the physical aspects of the data centers where applications and workloads are hosted.

The entire industry is quickly changing to keep pace. Many vendors are already rethinking past approaches and accepted norms to implement more intelligent aspects of data center design and use. Examples of these shifting considerations include factors such as density, cooling, energy management, sustainability, and even the ways data centers are operated.

Let’s take a closer look at each one of these topics and examine how they’re changing in response to new trends and shaping the evolution of data center design, now and into the future.

Increasing Density and Power Demands 

When executives are asked what they want to know about their data centers, chances are good that they focus on whether applications are available, will they perform as advertised, and what the cost is. However, they often don’t ask about another important factor—density—which has a direct impact on cost, performance, and availability.

Density is the amount of power a data center can provide within a cabinet, and what is required to run the application (servers and networking gear). The greater the density, the more compute resources that are available and the faster applications and workloads can run.

The drive for better performance—combined with the drop in price for high power compute—has led many IT departments to move to denser server systems. Whether these are 1U servers, blade servers, or even hyperconverged systems, it’s now normal to see rack densities at 10kW+ of power (up from 3-5kW per rack).

On top of this, the extreme growth of data and the demand for analysis of Big Data has increased dramatically. Just think of all the modern services performed on the vast amounts of data that users currently store: contextual searches of their photos, scrubbing of real-time videos for offensive content, analysis of shopping patterns, and targeted marketing to name a few.

These services and many others all run extremely compute-intensive artificial intelligence, which demands high power consumption hardware. This has led to special HPC (High Performance Computing, i.e., supercomputers) hardware that can drive power consumption at the rack level to 20kW, 50kW, or even 100kW and above.

Universal Data Hall Design: the Need for Flexibility

In a universal data hall design, the base design is slab floor with perimeter cooling, great for large full hall deployments typical to hyperscalers.  If there is demand for even higher density, technologies like rear door heat exchangers or direct chip cooling infrastructure can be piped in with minimal effort. In the other direction, if there is still a need for more traditional enterprise deployments, the data center owner can easily add raised floor to accommodate multiple customer requests of varying cabinet sizes, layouts, and other options. This universal approach provides the flexibility needed to accommodate pioneering customers while still supporting the late adopters during this transitional period.

Cooling

Packing a lot of power into less space can lead to cooling issues. Most data center providers can provide the power needed for high density, but they still must cool the generated heat. It doesn’t do any good to provide 2 MW of power into a data hall if the supporting infrastructure can only cool 1MW. The same is true if there’s not enough airflow to properly cool the equipment within individual racks.

The entire industry is likely to evolve away from perimeter cooling and will adopt technologies like rear door heat exchangers, direct chip cooling, and immersion cooling as density continues to climb.

As the entire industry continues to look for more energy-efficient alternatives, it should invest in equipment that offers more competitive energy performance and proven reliability. Some manufacturers now offer advanced chiller equipment that uses better compressor design with variable speed controls in conjunction with free air economization optimized to significantly reduce average annual electricity consumption. For example, the latest air-cooled chilling systems can now enhance uptime and reliability as well as energy performance, without the need for traditional water-based evaporative systems.

The industry could also benefit from new ways of thinking, especially when it comes to the expectation that data centers must be cold (usually 68-71°F). While some customers using traditional thinking still profess a preference for colder temperatures— “I want to feel cold”— modern IT equipment can easily run at higher temperatures than they currently do — for example, eight to 10 degrees hotter — without any significant sacrifices in system reliability. This alone could deliver significant power savings related to power consumption of the chillers.

Onsite Power Generation

Relying exclusively on utility power means a data center’s power costs will rise as overall demand rises. Being able to offset those costs at peak times with onsite power generation is a way to reduce total costs while improving overall efficiency.

At DataBank, we accomplished this in one of our Atlanta data centers. We partnered with a local utility (Georgia Power) to deploy a 1.5MW microgrid to support Georgia Tech’s High Performance Computing Center (HPCC), which is housed in the Atlanta data center. The microgrid runs in parallel to Georgia Power’s grid as an additional power source. It senses power demand and can provide power to the facility whenever needed.

The installation includes fuel cells, battery storage, diesel generators, and a natural gas generator, but it is also adaptive to new and additional distributed energy sources. It will be able to accommodate microturbines, solar panels, and electric vehicle chargers in the future.

Sustainable Energy Sources

There’s a bit of a catch-22 in the data center industry today. Customers want more power, yet they want it to come from the greenest energy sources possible. “Give me more power, but make it clean,” they seem to say. Many are even requesting detailed information about the data center’s energy consumption and overall carbon footprint.

As a result, there is a movement to transition away from power sources such as coal and natural gas toward electricity generated from renewable energy sources such as wind and solar. A growing number of data centers are already implementing various renewable energy strategies, and we believe more will continue to develop their own plans in the near future. For instance, DataBank’s parent, DigitalBridge, has directed all its portfolio companies to be carbon neutral by 2030.

In delivering on this mission, we have nine data centers that are powered by 100% renewable sources. For example, our two Indianapolis data centers moved 100% of their combined electricity usage into a voluntary program that directs Indianapolis Power and Light to purchase renewable energy from wind farms and other midwestern facilities.

The Future of Data Centers: Design for Greater Flexibility

So many factors are changing our perceptions of data center design and use, especially when it comes to power consumption, energy sources, and customers’ ever-changing requirements. Understanding these trends and their implications can help data center operators anticipate future needs and make more informed decisions to design more flexible —more successful—data centers today.

About the Author  

Eric Swartz, DataBank’s senior director of engineering has 19 years of experience in data center operations and infrastructure. Before joining DataBank, he held roles at Level 3 Communications, Fibernet, and Zayo Group. When he’s not a human jungle-gym for his kiddos, he spends his time thinking of better ways to deliver IT infrastructure to benefit customers and the planet.