Data centre
Today's business—your business—runs on digital information. It's essential that your data is safe, secure and easily accessible for designated users. When you let the experts at SaskTel take care of your data, your business benefits from cutting-edge technology, multi-layered security and highly skilled technicians normally available only to very large corporations.
The SaskTel Data Centre is a world-class facility in Saskatchewan, Canada that offers a safe and secure operating environment for servers and software applications. Today, SaskTel provides data centre services to government, corporate and private customers on more than 2,300 servers.
Building and location
The Data Centre is a building within a building; a dedicated, mutli-floor, site-hardened and windowless structure with a fire rating of 1.5 hours for walls and doors. Mechanical rooms, electronic control units and the Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) units are separate from the main server rooms to enhance the safety of your data.
To guarantee performance, the SaskTel Data Centre resides in a low risk setting. Natural hazards such as floods, earthquakes and tornadoes are rare, and human threats such as chemical spills or criminal activity are low. In case of emergency, police and fire services are readily available.
Environmental and safety controls
Humidity inside the Data Centre is carefully controlled and the temperature is kept at a constant 22°C (72°F), providing optimal operating conditions for data equipment. Roof mounted air conditioning units -in excess of what is required - supply ventilation.
The facility features a two-stage fire suppression system with cross-zoned detection that responds to either heat or smoke. In addition, a separate fire detection mechanism constantly samples the air and acts in tandem with detectors mounted on the ceiling.
Power system
The Data Centre is connected to the public power grid and operates with three diesel-powered backup generators that can accept load in one minute and are capable of operating for two weeks.
Power distribution within the facility's server area is achieved using two Power Distribution units. Redundant, parallel and synchronized UPS systems provide a steady and stable power supply to the Data Centre's infrastructure and servers. The UPS support systems provides protection from power surges before they reach any of the Data Centre's equipment.
Security and monitoring
The Data centre is protected by a number of measures:
- Bonded security personnel are on-site 24/7 and entries are electronically secured.
- Outer perimeter and corridors of the facility are monitored with closed circuit cameras and motion detectors to ensure that no unauthorized individuals gain access to the facility.
- To control access to the Data Centre itself, biometric scanners along with key-card access are utilized.
- Inside, highly trained and experienced technical staff monitor and maintain all systems for performance and availability on a 24/7 basis.
- For equipment behind a shared firewall, redundant Ethernet connectivity is provided with high availability load balanced switches, fire and intrusion detection systems and multiple connections to core internet providers.
- System vulnerability assessments are conducted on a regular basis to ensure maximum protection of all Data Centre infrastructure and system.
Backup and storage
SaskTel provides customers with several options for redundancy and backup including:
- RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Drives);
- hot and cold backups;
- daily, weekly and monthly system and data backups;
- off-site storage; and
- on-demand recovery of both data and applications.
A separate private internal network is in place for data backup to ensure isolation of data from other systems, networks and access ports. The use of redundantly connected, high availability NAS (Network Attached Storage) and SAN (Storage Area Network) data environments is also offered for any systems in the Data Centre.
Vendor relationships
Data Centre servers are devoted to a variety of functions, including applications, databases, data warehousing, systems management, e-mail and groupware. Given the wide arrray of resources used in delivering Data Centre services, SaskTel has established strong relationships with several vendors, including SUN Micosystems, HP, IBM, Microsoft, EMC, Cisco and Nortel.
Disaster preparedness
In the event of disaster, SaskTel is committed to maintaining service continuity to the greatest possible extent with the objective of protecting property, plant, service capability and resources. SaskTel maintains an Emergency Operations Centre, which can be activated when necessary for any internal or external situations.
SaskTel has developed Corporate Administrative Procedures that relate to disaster recovery plans and procedures. These procedures are backed by our on-call certified vendors and partners, and are designed to facilitate service continuity methods, as well as operations compatibility.
