What is Data Center Management?
Data Center Management refers to the role of individuals (data center managers) tasked within a data center to oversee technical and IT issues.
This includes management of computer and server operations, large amounts of data, services and applications, and the protection and security of the data. While some of these tasks must be directly managed, many can be automated, thereby reduce the number of on-site employees, eliminate unnecessary manual tasks, and reduce associated business costs.
Typical tasks in data center management
Upgrading Data Center Hardware & Software/Operating Systems
Data Distribution & Storage Management
Backup processes
Emergency planning
Technical support
What problems are encountered in daily Data Center Management?
- Management of multiple vendors & associated equipment, applications and operating systems with different contracts, warranties, process, licenses, patches and upgrade processes.
- Management of multiple data centers with different maturity levels, diverse equipment, processes, and procedures.
- Maintain SLAs in complex environments where there are different requirements for application availability, data retention, speed of recovery, and network availability.
- Monitor change where there are poor or no change control processes, antiquated equipment, and inability to keep infrastructure up to date.
- Manage data center cost and reduced budget, where resources are procured based on "best-cost" - regardless if it is deployed at the "edge", virtualized, or housed in a colocation. Additionally, energy and cooling costs remain a high percent of the budget.
- Deploy new services and applications faster with limited understanding of resource availability - capacity, power, and space, as well as inconsistent policies and structure.
What are the components of Data Center Management?
Data center managers require tools that provide resiliency, improve uptime, and reduce risk across the data center infrastructure - including network, power, IT equipment, applications software, and applications services.
Tools and processes that enable
Automation of changes to the infrastructure while providing a single source of information and a consolidated view across all facility, IT hardware, networks, and applications.
Monitoring and visualization of the data center, the associated status, and the changes within and across all systems and locations.
Collection and analysis of power, space and capacity information to determine how to utilize the data center more efficiently to save energy and space or increase to the utilization of existing equipment.
Processes to identify backup and disaster recovery plans in case of failure, this includes failover procedures and processes and the identification of available space, power and equipment
How does Data Center Infrastructure Management Software improve Data Center Management?
A well-oiled Data Center is one in which Data Center Managers use the tools and insight to provide a resilient environment where risk is minimized, uptime is maximized, and services and applications can be delivered fast with minimal costs.
Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) tools dramatically simplify data center management by giving data center operators the ability to run efficient data center operations and improve data center infrastructure planning and design. It typically replaces Excel, Visio, and home grown databases.
Maximize Uptime
Constantly monitoring critical facilities infrastructure, DCIM software polls equipment, collects, trends, and reports on data, and monitors for threshold violations. With built in alerting, you can react before failures impact users and services.
Drive Efficiency
Automatically collect data from building feeds, IT loads, and non-IT loads for immediate calculation and trending of PUE across all your data centers to ensure corporate energyefficiency initiatives.
Increase Productivity
Reservations, moves, adds, and changes are easily accomplished through fully integrated and automated workflow management. Process assurance, tracking and audit trails dramatically increase employee productivity and morale.