Adding Efficiency to Data Center Management

By CIOReview | Monday, February 20, 2017

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With advent of new age technologies such as cloud, on-premise solutions are witnessing gradual decline in their adoption. Today, every business aspires to be agile, scalable, and adept more than ever to address varying business demands. As cloud has emerged as the best choice to meet the operational and business requirements of a modern enterprise, data centers have an increasingly crucial role in catering to the operational demands that arise from cloud-native products and services. In terms of the IT infrastructure, data center holds great significance for performing a gamut of business processes. Hence, it will be a great folly on CIO’s part to overlook data center’s significance; data center in today’s world is one of the key aspect of asset planning for modern businesses.

Why Data Center Management is Crucial?

Companies do not invest adequately in tools and practices to manage the data. Age-old i operating system deployed for server management that has not been , IT tools with least features to monitor data center performance, partially dysfunctional hardware, collectively as well as alone, can restrain the companies from effective IT infrastructure management. With plenty of investments done on legacy client-server IT model, businesses are falling behind in leveraging the modern IT capabilities to gain a competitive edge in the marketplace. In this situation, IT leadership should take a fresh look at their data center strategy in order to improve their cost effectiveness. Typically, data centers play numerous tasks simultaneously and ensure business operations and processes are running appropriately.

As a key IT asset of an organization, data center manages telecommunication network, facilitate the communication between carriers and their end customers, and ensure seamless transfer of information irrespective of its format, to the end users. With the growing demand for faster delivery of information, a typical data center holds the key to business success for the enterprises.

The Way Forward to Effective Data Center Management

For making data centers a part of business success story, a holistic approach is required to tackle the conundrums in data center landscape. A number of factors contribute toward efficient data center management and they range from energy efficient practices to data center capacity management. Again, newly enforced security regulations solicit robust security mechanism for data centers. IT leadership should devise a plan that would be inclusive of facility management techniques and addressing critical issues pertinent to performance, management, and capacity planning. DCIM tools like CA DCIM, Cormant-CS, Intel DCM simplify the data center management and provide more visibility into operations. These products perform multitude of tasks like monitoring power usage, cooling, capacity and inventory planning, individual server, rack, and power distribution unit management. These DCIM tools also correlate facility and IT infrastructure and eventually helps to constrain capital expenditure on power consumption.

Better Planning

Data centers are not immune to sudden failures and major breakdowns. A black swan moment in terms of catastrophes due to unprecedented issue may lead to disruption of business operations. The probability leads to having a contingency plan for any untoward scenario. Several large organizations have devised products that act as disaster recovery agents, which are easy to deploy and operate. Sun Microsystems’ Sun Modular Datacenter, IBM Portable Modular Data Center are some of the platforms that conspicuously serve as disaster recovery mechanisms for the companies. Further, Correlata provides an intuitive Analytics Platform that helps organizations in reducing IT infrastructure management cost while mitigating risks by maximizing usability and efficiency of the existing IT infrastructure elements.

In sync with the advancement of technology and business demands, the solution providers have created tools that are not only able to track primary parameters in data centers like server management but also ensure energy efficiency. The need of the hour is that IT leadership should ponder over conventional practices and tools that are employed at the facilities. Though measure like virtualization, may give respite, the scope of its application is limited. Prudence will be in adhering to holistic approach and solutions that will only prune misallocation of resources.