Test-type question

I had a bunch of questions that were not covered in any of my prep material... and though most of them were intuitive, this one blew me away. I have no idea how to answer it.

So let me see if I can word it sufficiently different that no one feels the need to flame me about the NDA, while still helping me understand the logic behind your answer.

Let's say I own a 10-story building. I'd like to place a data-center with an information processing facility on one of the floors. Which floor would you pick? And why?

Personally, I'd be partial to the ground floor. Or possibly the basement. As for why... ease of access for employees and customers; quick exit in case of emergency; also ease of accessibility for delivery/courier type guys.

My other instinct is to go with the top floor. Only because I know of a data center in Toronto, where the building owner had an office on the second floor, above the server farm on the first floor. In his office was a shower. Over night a pipe burst, and by the time anyone could arrive on site and respond to the calls about outages, 20 odd servers were destroyed. I think that with washroom on every floor, any floor other than the top floor runs the risk of water damage.

So, thoughts?
Mike

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

cyberguypr

I saw this in either the Conrad orHarris book. You want center of middle floor, away from windows. Basement is magnet for flooding. Top is an issue in case of fire.

mikearama

Yeah, basement seams obvious, in retrospect. Forget that one.

The obvious question then is how the middle floor is any less of a fire risk than the top floor?? For that matter, fire makes the first floor the most obvious choice, no?

wes allen

The other issue with upper floors is getting / storing fuel for generators. No good having dry servers and flooded generators.

Might have been one of those experimental questions on the test, but there are some great write ups from Sandy on how data centers handled operations.

cyberguypr

I don't think it was experimental as this was clearly mentioned in several sources I studied. The issue with top floor is accessibility for emergency crews in the event of a disaster (Harris 5th ed, pg. 425.)

Remember there are 3 ways to do things: the right way, the wrong way, and the ISC2 way.

wes allen

Was this for CISSP? I wasn't sure if it was CISSP or one of the other tests, though I don't doubt that it would be in the CISSP material. I don't really remember if I had a question like this or not on the test.

JDMurray

Any floor has both problems and benefits. Basements floods, personnel evacuations and recuses are problematic on top floors, ground floors are easier to burglarize, very heavy equipment can't be easily located on upper floors, etc. The best data center layouts I've seen are single-floor warehouse design that is on a raised Earth foundation with racks and cages that (seem to) spread out for miles.

krupal_bhatt

Bit of an out of band question but which question set can be considered at similar difficulty levels as CISSP exam; CCCure ? AIO ? Conrad ? Other then ISACA's own ?

pgriffin7

Harris 6th Edition, page 452 indicates that an internal compartment is best for a data center and page 454 agrees with the above posters in saying that top floors are tough for Emergency folks to get to and basements are prone to flooding.