AMAR

Ensuring Availability through System Design

MDS, in conjunction with K8T Ltd, has developed to ITIL standards, an integrated suite of management tools to enable ongoing and real-time Assessing, Managing, Alerting and Reporting (AMAR™)

MDS has been utilising AMAR™ for some time and has seen an identifiable improvement in efficiency and availability. This required:

• Development of K8Tram, which integrates a drag and drop asset management solution with a "light" computation flow dynamics application, providing a scenario planning tool to assess the impact of design changes or rack reconfiguration on the heat loading within the data suite.
• Configuration of a wide range of sensing and monitoring points using Nagios® and integration into MDS's existing RESPOND alerting system
• Development of appropriate reporting options, configurable for different clients.

Assessment

• Assessment of design alternatives
  • to assist effective planning and modification of the hardware configuration, taking into consideration the potential impact on heat loadings (associated fire risk), power consumption (carbon footprint and distribution limitations) and cooling dynamics (temperature design limitations) in particular
  • to enable easier and more intuitive asset management of equipment at a variety of perspectives i.e. from the server/switch/etc, through racks, rows, vaults, data centres through to multiple centres

Monitoring

• Monitoring of operational status
• To monitor and visually represent a range of critical information sensed and captured within the Data Centre, via a variety of devices, including but not limited to:
  • building management status (biometric/digital controls, security alarms, visitor management, climate management, water detection, etc)
  • environmental status (temperature of vaults/racks/server/CPU, climate control performance, humidity, vibration levels, noise, etc)
  • power consumption (distribution of power against design tolerance to centre/ vault/ rack/ server, UPS status, back-up system status, current, phasing volatility, etc)
  • hardware performance (CPU usage, disk space/ status, swap space, fan usage, response times, etc)
  • application performance (data table usage/response, o/s monitoring, etc)
  • network performance (intrusion detection, bandwidth peak/ average/ trend, data transfer, packet size, IP connectivity uptime, VLAN uptime, web page response/ uptime, etc)

Alerting and Reporting

• Alerting of pre-critical states
  • Notification to engineers (own and clients) of a breach of pre-established tolerance levels for any and all status reading that are monitored, via appropriate systems (automated phone call, paging, sms, email, etc) depending on the criticality of alert and desired response timescale (linked to specific SLA)
    
• Reporting of historical events to assist redesign
  • Reporting of information related to assessment, monitoring and alert triggers in a format (word doc, pdf, spreadsheet, data export) and timescale (real-time via extranet, near-real time via overnight, weekly, exception reporting etc) as appropriate. This included extranet access to progression of support activities in real-time.