PRACTICES TO ENSURE A MORE RELIABLE DATA CENTER

A data center is the core operating point of any IT infrastructure. Data centers house an enormous amount of information, which makes it all the more important to have a regular maintenance procedure. Daily routine checkup, as well as maintenance guidelines at regular intervals can help the data centers exercise efficiently.

Recent analyses by Gartner have proven that organizations these days look for more redundant data center solutions. Business agility is pushing these businesses to look for means that provide for a reliable and high performing data center. This in turn would enable them to frame data centers according to business needs.

Prepare and repair: If there is an existing data center that needs improvements, make the necessary changes to have a greater technological impact on the organization as a whole.

Target the ‘nothing’: Every organization consists of staggering number of equipments, operating systems, and hardware. Data centers which are a few years old have equipments and hardware that consume a lot of energy. Some data centers still house systems which do not help in operations, but create a cost many times more to operate than it is worth. Creating methods for the removal, replacement for such hardware is the best start towards reliability.

Rationalize the data center network: many organizations show certain amount of disparity between their core services and data centers. Data centers are not given the right amount of consideration that they deserve. It is important that the IT designers take the help of the experts for designing of a data center. It should be ensured that the data center is built according to the current design models. This should include support for wide-area network (WAN), network-attached storage (NAS), local-area network (LAN) and storage-area network (SAN) resources. The four elements used in characterization of the Tier data centers should be borne in mind. Design the data centers keeping in mind the current requirements and the future prospects. Follow industry standards to optimize cabling and networking efficiency.

Be energy and eco friendly: Take the help of the experts and analyze if your data center is running at optimum energy. If not, deploy measures such as advanced passive containment options for airflow, cabling and cooling that will streamline efficiency, maximize usage of current capacity and better manage the data center environment. Uninterruptable Power Supply (UPS) efficiency, passive cooling containment and various free-cooling options should all be considered.

Move to the cloud: Leverage cloud based technologies to offset cost, and also to deliver reliable IT services in the shortest possible duration with more uptime. This is definitely something that has to be on top of any IT manager’s list of priority.

The reality is that every IT organization has some type of traditional infrastructure- and software-delivery models they must contend with, but that doesn’t mean you can’t look for ways to improve performance. Logicalis, for example, has created a consulting framework to help clients determine what’s most essential and how to best shape a roadmap to drive toward a leaner delivery model that uses cloud technology to meet their specific business requirements.

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