Data Center Infrastructure & Operations Flashcards

A hospital requires its EHR data center to tolerate any single component failure without downtime during planned maintenance. Which Uptime Institute tier minimum meets this requirement?

Answer: Tier III

Tier III is concurrently maintainable, so any component can be taken offline for planned maintenance without disrupting IT operations.

What does the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metric measure in a healthcare data center?

Answer: Ratio of total facility power to IT equipment power

PUE is total facility energy divided by IT equipment energy, and a value closer to 1.0 means better efficiency.

During a utility outage, which device keeps servers running for the seconds to minutes before the backup generator takes the load?

Answer: Uninterruptible power supply

The UPS supplies battery power immediately so there is no gap while the generator starts and the transfer switch moves the load.

A clinic's leadership sets a maximum acceptable data loss of 15 minutes for its lab system. Which metric does this define?

Answer: Recovery Point Objective

RPO is the maximum amount of data, measured in time, that can be lost after an incident.

Which cooling layout separates cold supply air from hot exhaust air by facing server rack fronts toward each other?

Answer: Hot aisle/cold aisle arrangement

Rack fronts face a shared cold aisle and backs face a shared hot aisle, which prevents hot and cold air from mixing.

Under the HIPAA Security Rule, controls such as badge access, visitor logs, and locked server rooms fall into which safeguard category?

Answer: Physical safeguards

Facility access controls and workstation security are physical safeguards under 45 CFR 164.310.

Which fire suppression approach is generally preferred in a hospital server room because it avoids water damage to electronics?

Answer: Clean agent gaseous suppression

Clean agents such as FM-200 or Novec 1230 put out fires without leaving residue or water on equipment.