The Principles Of a Sustainable Data Center Design

The Principles Of a Sustainable Data Center Design

Today’s economy is powered by digital infrastructure. Digital infrastructure must be as efficient and clean as possible to guarantee that today’s digital firms can operate sustainably for many years.

At UnitedLayer, we are conscious that our customers rely on us as partners in their sustainability strategy. This motivated us to make a global climate-neutral pledge for our infrastructure by 2030 and to cut emissions throughout our operations and supply chain.

We have met several milestones aligned with the key pillars discussed below. In this blog, we’ll cover just a few of the many innovations we’re pursuing to make our data centers cleaner and more efficient.

According to Statista, “Given its high energy demand, 45% of total IT carbon footprint is caused by data centers across the globe.” 

Principles driving a Sustainable Data Center:

  • Low-carbon energy
  • Using Digital Tools
  • Software-optimized and automated
  • High-efficiency cooling

Low-carbon energy helps us scale data volumes without increasing emissions

While increasing the data centers‘ energy efficiency is a primary focus, we understand that energy use is unavoidable. We have set a goal of using only renewable energy in all our data centers worldwide. By achieving this, we will help our customers’ digital supply chains become greener and reduce our carbon impact.

Use digital tools available to optimize operations

With the introduction of the smart grid, the grid has become more autonomous, giving rise to peer-to-peer networks to facilitate energy flow and prevent disturbance. Digital technologies, such as digital substations for larger data centers, utility, and industrial use, are available to support protection and control requirements. Furthermore, digital asset management platforms can help data center operators evaluate the relative health of their essential power components, allowing them to shift away from planned maintenance or break/fix schemes and toward more proactive and predictive maintenance techniques.

Transform Your Sustainable Future With UnitedLayer

Working smarter toward greater efficiency with software optimization

Knowing where waste occurs is one of the essential prerequisites for decreasing energy waste in data centers. UnitedLayer has become a pioneer in this sustainability field. To facilitate power optimization measures, we introduced software-optimized data center systems.

Using our UnityOneCloud tool, you can track and optimize the data center device’s carbon emissions and energy consumption with remote data center management functionalities. You can also reduce carbon emissions by optimizing the power required by the devices in the data center.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) have become essential IT future-proofing concerns, much like sustainability plans. It only makes sense to employ sustainability and AI/ML since both are crucial to the future of IT. Automated data centers can utilize AI algorithms to collect essential data, analyze it to forecast sustainability indicators under various conditions, and adjust operations as necessary. These algorithms can also be used to automate power-aware workload orchestration, which balances power demand and schedules workloads according to the availability of renewable energy.

High-efficiency cooling helps limit energy waste

Data center efficiency is measured using power usage effectiveness (PUE), which compares the total energy used by a data center with the portion used specifically for IT equipment. Operators must use less overhead energy that doesn’t directly power IT equipment if they want to lower PUE. High-efficiency cooling is a crucial component of the sustainability equation because cooling systems use an estimated 75% of the additional energy.

GET A CLOSER LOOK AT THE UNITEDLAYER SUSTAINABILITY STRATEGY

We have barely touched the surface of UnitedLayer’s sustainability narrative in this blog. We’re proud of our advancements, but we’re not about to stop anytime soon. The story is being written every day.

We help enterprises get complete visibility and transparency of their carbon footprints and map their journey toward sustainability. To date, we have transformed a few hundred customers into achieving net zero carbon emissions, and the count is increasing daily. Our robust solutions, such as carbon-neutral recommendation engines, cognitive carbon analysis, dashboards, and reports, have already benefitted our customers in reducing their global carbon footprints.

To learn more about our product and services, click here!

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Abhijit Phanse, CEO of UnitedLayer and UnityOneCloud Inducted into Forbes Technology Council

Forbes Technology Council Is an Invitation-Only Community for World-Class CIOs, CTOs, and Technology Executives.

San Francisco, CA (June 20th, 2022) — Abhijit Phanse, CEO of UnitedLayer, a global leader in providing colocation and private cloud solutions, and CEO of UnityOneCloud, the leading Hybrid Cloud Management SaaS platform, has been inducted into Forbes Technology Council, an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs, and technology executives.

Abhijit Phanse was vetted and selected by a review committee based on the depth and diversity of his experience. Criteria for acceptance include a track record of successfully impacting business growth metrics, as well as personal and professional achievements and honors.

“We are honored to welcome Abhijit Phanse into the community,” said Scott Gerber, founder of Forbes Councils, the collective that includes Forbes Technology Council. “Our mission with Forbes Councils is to bring together proven leaders from every industry, creating a curated, social capital-driven network that helps every member grow professionally and make an even greater impact on the business world.”

“I am pleased to be a part of this elite council where I can learn, share, and hone my knowledge along with my fellow members, and very much thankful to Forbes Tech Council for giving me such a wonderful opportunity” – said Abhijit Phanse, CEO, UnitedLayer & UnityOneCloud. “The adoption of cloud is transforming the industry and businesses are no longer relying on a single cloud provider to run their operations, but are instead moving towards multicloud and hybrid cloud models to deploy truly scalable, redundant, and optimized infrastructure as a service. At UnitedLayer, we have had the privilege of delivering the industry-leading hybrid cloud solution at a global scale for the past two decades, and UnityOneCloud has become the most comprehensive Hybrid Cloud Management single-pane-of-glass platform enabling service providers and enterprises to manage their diverse portfolio of data center assets and cloud services distributed across private, public, hybrid, and edge cloud locations”.

About Forbes Councils

Forbes Councils is a collective of invitation-only communities created in partnership with Forbes and the expert community builders who founded Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC). In Forbes Councils, exceptional business owners and leaders come together with the people and resources that can help them thrive.

For more information about Forbes Technology Council, visit forbestechcouncil.com. To learn more about Forbes Councils, visit forbescouncils.com.

About UnitedLayer:

UnitedLayer is the leading Hybrid Cloud provider offering Colocation, Private Cloud IaaS, Managed Cloud Services, and Multicloud Management solutions. UnitedLayer was established in 2001 and is headquartered in San Francisco, CA. Its key industries include TMT, BFSI, Public Sector, Healthcare, Retail, Logistics, and Oil & Gas, as it serves clients globally with its 100+ data center footprints in the Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East. e information, visit: www.unitedlayer.com

About UnityOneCloud:

UnityOneCloud is the leading Hybrid Cloud and Multicloud Management SaaS Platform, which incorporates comprehensive Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) and a Cloud Management Platform (CMP) capability, enabling enterprises to manage data centers, private clouds, and public clouds using a single pane of glass. UnityOneCloud provides real-time observability, performance monitoring and alerting, management, audit and compliance, cost analysis, ITSM ticketing, DevOps automation, AIOps, and carbon footprint analysis. For more information, visit: www.unityonecloud.com.

Discord Back-up & Running After Outage in 2022

Discord Back-up & Running After Outage in 2022

Discord experienced outages on Tuesday, according to various user reports, social media accounts, and the website Down Detector. Discord’s outage began around 12 p.m. EST, causing disruptions on the popular chat app.

To fix this problem, Discord officials said that “We are aware of an issue causing message failures and are working on a fix”.

 

discord

 

A thorough investigation from Discord started for the “API Errors and Push Notification Errors” at 12:16 p.m. EST and efforts were taken to find and remediate the issues. The incident report stated that a “root cause was also found in their streaming service” at 1:08 p.m. EST, involving a controlled restart, which would have resulted in a “brief disruption of streaming, which leads to the outage.”

Discord has already experienced multiple outages in 2022. This includes one as recently as February and a two-hour outage in January, which prevented users from joining calls or using chat functions. According to “USA Today,” Discord also experienced a major outage earlier in November 2021, along with Spotify, Snapchat, and Etsy, all affected by Google Cloud issues.

Here, in the case of Discord, they could have mitigated this issue if they had hosted their infrastructure on a private cloud. The reason is private clouds such as our G3 private cloud gives them greater control, visibility, and guaranteed up-time of 99.999% as compared to public clouds, which offer an uptime of 99.95%. Also, our G3 private cloud users get control to set up and manage Routers, switches, firewalls, load balancers, PDU, WAN configuration, traffic engineering, BGP, security, DDoS mitigation, monitoring, alerting, and WAN optimization for guaranteed performance. Our users can observe and analyze the status of their devices, health, and performance for complete visibility of their infrastructure. This gives them an edge to mitigate issues quickly and not get stuck in vendor lock-ins, similar to what happened previously in the case of discord.

How Unitedlayer can help you?

UnitedLayer offers its users enterprise-grade G3 private cloud solutions where customers can host their application on dedicated private cloud servers powered by OpenStack, VMware, Hyper-V. It comes with all benefits of cloud computing with greater control and security of the enterprise-grade private cloud.

  • We guarantee the availability of 99.999% with N+M clusters
  • We offer fully flexible vCPU and RAM size configurations without lock-in on specific VM types, along with adaptive resizing.
  • We provide high performance compute through all-flash storage ranging from 1K- 100K+ IOPS on 10g/40g/100g network fabric infrastructure.  
Spotify Is Down, Do You Know Why?

Spotify Is Down, Do You Know Why?

On Tuesday, March 8, 2022, the entire world witnessed their favorite music app: Spotify, unresponsive. It was not a mere internet connection error but a major outage that inconvenienced the global music enthusiasts. This outage logged users out of their accounts without the ability to log in again or reset the password. It appeared to occur sometime around 1:15 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (EST).

Data from downdetector.co.uk suggested that more than 72,000 problematic reports came in with the music streaming service in just an hour. For tracks that have already been synchronized with a user’s Android or iOS device, the issue does not occur. Whereas users who try to play any music they’ve recently played on the app are experiencing a persistent outage.

Spotify users were logged out and prompted to log in. Upon entering the user’s email address, the music streaming platform didn’t recognize the email address associated with the account. According to a few sources, the issue raised was majorly due to mismanagement of traffic handling on servers they are hosted on. What could Spotify have done to overcome this issue?

The one solution can be a reliable private cloud solution provider because public clouds come with a SLA of 99.95% uptime, whereas our G3 private cloud comes with guaranteed 99.999% uptime, and we achieve this by enabling next-generation firewalls (NGFW) with automated network mapping and automated firewall change policy monitoring to adapt for workloads. We also optimize load balancing for our customers based on traffic by distributing incoming traffic for peak performance, bypassing any failed server, and increasing scalability by adding more servers so that our customers always be sure they are on the business line, unlike what happened in the case of Spotify.

After numerous reports, finally, Spotify tweeted.

As per the CEO of Cloudflare, the online outage that affected Spotify, Discord, Wikipedia, and other Internet companies appeared to be a Google Cloud malfunction.

How UnitedLayer Can Help You?   

UnitedLayer offers its users enterprise-grade G3 private cloud solutions where customers can host their application on dedicated private cloud servers powered by OpenStack, VMware, Hyper-V. It comes with all benefits of cloud computing with greater control and security of the enterprise-grade private cloud.  

  • We guarantee the availability of 99.999% with N+M clusters.  
  • We offer fully flexible vCPU and RAM size configurations without lock-in on specific VM types, along with adaptive resizing.  
  • We provide high-performance compute through all-flash storage ranging from 1K- 100K+ IOPS on 10g/40g/100g network fabric infrastructure.  
Facebook Outage: What Went Wrong?

Facebook Outage: What Went Wrong?

On October 4, 2021, Facebook and its other platforms, including Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, went down globally for close to six hours. As services are restored, questions about what caused the Facebook outage and why it took so long to resolve are raised.

For hours, billions of users could not access Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp as the social media giant worked to restore services.

Why did Facebook go down?

People began to notice they couldn’t access Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or Messenger shortly before 5 p.m. UTC. It would take more than five hours for services to be restored.

Facebook issued a statement about the Facebook outage that the cause of the outage was a configuration change to the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between the company’s data centers, which had a cascading effect, bringing all Facebook services to a halt. It meant not only was Facebook gone, but everything Facebook runs disappeared too.

It involves two things that sort out how the internet works – that is Domain Name System (DNS) and Border Gateway Protocol (BGP).
The internet has a lot of connected networks. So that means to keep the order of things, you need something like BGP to tell you where you need to go. DNS is essentially the address system for the location of each website – its IP address – while BGP is the roadmap that finds the most efficient way to get to that IP address.

According to Cloudflare, Facebook made some changes to its BGP configuration on Monday via a series of updates which resulted in the disappearance of routing paths to Facebook servers and causing global facebook outage. But not just for Facebook; it applies to everything Facebook runs. As a result, people attempting to access Facebook were unable to do so.

Why were Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp down?

Not only Facebook but all of its services were affected. It included Facebook’s internal systems, with reports of employees being locked out of offices and unable to access their own internal communications platform.

Can this sort of outage be avoided in the future?

People use Facebook to connect with friends and family and log into other services such as online sales websites. Through services such as WhatsApp, it has become the dominant mode of communication in some countries. The fact that an outage can have such a significant impact on billions of people for several hours must give some pause for thought.

Moving on, UnitedLayer’s disaster recovery solution enables enterprises to be resilient and respond to these critical situations faster and allows them to operate their business without any interruptions. Boasting zero downtime for the last ten years, we also guarantee the availability of 99.999% with high-availability N+2 Clusters.

Our Disaster Recovery Solutions are highly customizable, where customers can build specific Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) according to their business requirements. With on-demand scalability, you can add additional resources to meet the increased replication needs, this helps in reducing cost and improving business flexibility. UnitedLayer’s DR solutions are highly secure and compliant with all the industry-leading compliance standards like HIPAA and PCI.

UnitedLayer also offers setup and management of highly available routers, including setting up WAN configuration, traffic engineering, BGP, security, DDoS mitigation, monitoring, alerting, and WAN optimization for guaranteed performance.

With 20 years of experience in configuring and managing highly available networks globally has resulted in zero network downtime in the last one decade.

About UnitedLayer

UnitedLayer provides the Colocation services from one of the largest data centers in San Francisco, USA, at 200 Paul Ave. Our long list of managed services enables enterprises to modernize their infrastructure and improve their responsiveness, resource utilization, scalability, and agility resulting in better customer experience and faster time to market.

To get a better insight into what else UnitedLayer has got in store, sign up for a free demo today.

Ransomware As A Service (RaaS) Explained

Ransomware As A Service (RaaS) Explained

What is Ransomware?

Ransomware, which dates back to 1989, is a form of malware that infects and takes control of a computer user’s machine, or secure documents stored on it, to extort money. 

Ransomware is a malware format that encrypts the files of a victim. The attacker then demands that the victim be liable for payment to restore data access. Instructions for paying the money to acquire the decryption key are shown to users. Ransomware as a service (RaaS) is a ransomware infrastructure rented out on the dark web to hackers. This is a simple platform to access ransomware attacks and install them on the victim’s machine to acquire the extortion amount.

How do RaaS attacks work?

The majority of ransomware victims fall victim to Social Engineering Attacks. The term ‘social engineering’ refers to a wide variety of malicious activities carried out through human interactions. It uses psychological manipulation to lead users to make security errors or to provide sensitive information. Many individuals and organizations fall prey to these types of attacks.

The real-world consequences of a successful cyberattack were highlighted this month when ransomware shut down one of the United State’s biggest pipelines.

Colonial Pipeline said that after being the victim of a cyberattack, the company was forced to shut down operations and freeze IT systems proactively. The FBI blamed the attack on DarkSide, a cybercriminal gang believed to be based in Eastern Europe, and Colonial reportedly paid a $5 million ransom to the group.

The increased number of cyberattacks and data breaches have roesulted in substantial monetary and non-monetary losses to businesses across industries which is why UnitedLayer offers automated, robust cybersecurity, compliance, and risk management programs based on the most comprehensive set of frameworks, benchmarks, and guidelines available, boosting confidence in the company’s security compliance posture.

What steps should businesses take for ransomware protection?

  • Educate your employees: Employees can serve as the first line of defense against online threats, actively helping prevent malware infiltration into the organization’s system. Employee education about warning signals, safe practices, and responses, along with a robust security program, can go a long way toward preventing these attacks.
  • Employ a data backup and recovery plan for all critical information: Backups are essential for minimizing the effects of malware threats. To access the data in the event of a ransomware attack, store it on a separate device or offline.
  • Perform a Risk Assessment: A Risk Assessment is a premium and practical way to help protect your organization. Risk assessments help you identify and resolve vulnerabilities in your IT security and privacy. Following a plan based on a risk assessment will significantly reduce your risks, saving you time and money in the long run.

How UnitedLayer can help

UnitedLayer offers a variety of security solutions that not only resolve the security concerns outlined in this blog but can also be customized to suit your organization’s specific security needs. Let’s take a look at UnitedLayer’s portfolio of products and see how they address the security concerns, as well as how they can work together to protect your business better.

    • Compliance Automation: We provide regular assessments of security vulnerabilities with prescriptive remediations across your entire hybrid infrastructure (cloud, on-premises, and containers). Regular reports/documentation to support compliance with internal security policies to expedite the auditing process. We have the richest library of security frameworks (NIST, DISA, etc.), benchmarks (CIS OS, cloud, and Docker), and compliances (SOC, ISO, GDPR, PCI, HIPAA) with advanced compliance mapping. Co-author of both Docker and Kubernetes Security Benchmarks from the beginning.
    • Network Security: Our cutting-edge security solutions protect client infrastructure from any external security threats. We provide IPsec VPN, SSL VPN, IDS/IPS services for secured access to cloud infrastructure. In addition to this, we also offer DoS/DDoS protection against all types of network attacks and threats. We have multiple firewalls in place for each customer deployment to increase network security redundancy.
    • Application Security: Our application security services ensure the safety and security of your sensitive business information from any security threats. With application penetration tests or ethical hacking, we help organizations identify the security vulnerabilities present in the application. Our secure code analysis enables organizations to verify that proper security controls are present in the application.
    • Virtual Security: We provide security partners like Gateway Firewall, Web Firewall, Application Firewall, DDOS mitigation, VLAN Segmentation, Security Incident Monitoring, Private Cloud implementation with ACL, and lockdown of the ports and IP address along with the encryption of data at rest and in transit.
    • Data Security: We use several methods to ensure the integrity and confidentiality of the data we receive from our customers. Our production data is regularly encrypted and backed up. AES-256 is used to encrypt data at rest, while TLS 1.2 is used to encrypt data in transit.

At UnitedLayer, we have a growing list of managed services, which helps corporations restructure their infrastructure and enhance their responsiveness, optimization, resource efficiency, and flexibility, leading to better and enhanced customer experience and quicker time to market.

Visit our website and register for a free demo today to get a glimpse into what else we have to offer.

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