The data center industry is continuously challenged with staying up to and sometimes ahead of the ever-changing technological advancements as well as the growing customer demands. It’s getting more and more difficult for data center engineers and managers to ensure higher uptimes, handle costs, and deploy fast at the same time. But it’s not impossible either. How? Let’s find out!
75% of data center managers installed DCIM to cut costs. (Source: Data Center Dynamics )
Listed below are the top 5 challenges faced by data center managers while implementing and managing data centers. Also, how data center infrastructure management (DCIM) solutions can come to their rescue by making the operations easy.
Challenge #1: Real-time Monitoring and Reporting
Data centers have a lot going on inside them, so unexpected failures are inevitable. There are applications, connecting cables, network connectivity, cooling systems, power distribution, storage units, and much more running all at once. Constant monitoring and reporting different metrics is a must for data center operators and managers.
A DCIM system provides deeper insights into the data center operations and performance metrics. It helps you track, analyze, and generate reports real-time, so you’re capable of taking well-informed decisions and immediate actions accordingly.
Challenge #2: Capacity Planning and Management
More often than not, data center managers tend to over-provision so as to avoid downtimes. This results in wastage of resources and space. Also, causing power and energy wastage. With the increase in data, the capacity of a data center was always an unsolved question for data center managers. But only until the data center infrastructure management solution was discovered.
By using a DCIM system, data center managers can find out the idle physical space, capacity, power, cooling, and other resources used in a data center. This way, it’s easy to optimize the capacity as well as cut costs, save energy, and avoid downtime, at the same time.
Challenge #3: Uptime and Performance Maintenance
Measuring the performance and ensuring uptime of data centers is the major concern for data center managers and operators. This also includes maintaining power and cooling accuracy and ensuring the energy efficiency of the overall structure. Manually calculating the metrics is of no or a very little help in most cases.
A powerful tool like a DCIM system, helps you, as a data center manager, to measure the essential metrics like Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) in real-time, making it easy for you to optimize and manage the uptime and other performances.
Challenge #4: Energy Efficiency and Cost Cutting
The data center (DC) sector, in particular, is estimated to account for 1.4% of the global electricity consumption. (Source: MDPI)
The data center industry is often caught in trouble because of its massive amount of energy consumption and rising temperature problem. Many a time, more energy is found to be wasted than used at a data center site. This happens when there is lack of proper energy monitoring tools and environmental sensors.
With a DCIM system, you can monitor energy consumption efficiently, optimize it, and also cut costs where possible. This will help you reduce your data center costs and be energy efficient and environment-friendly, all at once.
Challenge #5: Staff Productivity Management
Tracking, analyzing, and reporting performances of all the data center infrastructure is a daunting task. It may take a lot of your staff’s time and efforts. Yet, you can’t ensure accuracy when monitoring is carried out manually. A DCIM solution will help you automate these operations and free a lot of your staff’s time. You can also automate workflow approvals and assign technicians for particular tasks, along with the automation of other manual tasks.
With the developing technology, applications, data, and devices, data centers are subjected to continuously evolve with it. Now that you know what challenges you may face as a data center manager and how to face them, a DCIM system will definitely aid the process and make your life easier.Looking for the best data center infrastructure management software for your business? Connect with the experts at Prasa Infocom and Power Solutions. We provide world-class DCIM and BMS systems for the optimum performance of your data center and in turn, your business.
Great content! This is exactly the sort of thing I was looking for. Thanks for your help 🙂