Data center management enables performance optimization

By Traci Yarbrough, Product Marketing Manager, Aperture, an Emerson Network Power brand

One of the more interesting offshoots of the increased emphasis on data center energy efficiency is the realization that by doing things more efficiently, we often are doing them better. In other words, efficiency is about more than energy—it’s about optimizing data center performance.

Understanding this fundamental truth is critically important in a world where budgets limit new equipment purchases and data center management is under daily pressure to reduce electric bills. Finding ways to do more with less is the only way to support the increasing reliance on IT in a business environment where IT budgets are shrinking.

An optimized data center improves energy efficiency, extends equipment lifespan by ensuring resources are sized correctly, proactively manages the capacity of the IT infrastructure, increases the effectiveness of staff and decreases the consumption of resources. And the key to achieving performance optimization is comprehensive data center management and monitoring.

Data center management, as a practice, typically progresses through levels of maturity. The most fundamental level involves simply understanding what equipment you have, where it is, and how all of the devices are connected. Although it sounds simple, this is an important and sometimes overlooked first step. Taking it a step further means subjecting the data center to standard processes to reduce errors and increase the effectiveness of staff. That then leads to proactively managing demand—understanding the new project pipeline (from the business), what projects are lined up for the future, and whether there will be enough power, cooling and space to support them.

Which brings us to the next step—continual optimization. This can be accomplished by choosing the best solution for your organization’s infrastructure based on comprehensive measurements from the equipment and the environment. With this data, you can predict remaining capacity in the entire data center, within a zone or at the rack level. You can manage power and heat density more effectively, helping you get the most out of your cooling system while ensuring you do not overload the infrastructure. You can prolong the life of your data center, saving huge capital investment costs by utilizing all of the available resources at a level you choose. Finally, you can calculate accurately and communicate the infrastructure costs of specific systems and applications running in the data center for charge-backs or to identify and reduce costly growth of applications requiring IT support.

This approach broadens the IT Service Management (ITSM) discipline to include the entire data center, and is known as Data Center Service Management (DCSM). DCSM helps organizations employ an integrated set of systems and processes to holistically manage the data center as a single entity, including the overall physical infrastructure, all in relation to business services. Only by managing the data center from this holistic perspective - by taking every aspect and responsibility within the data center into account - can organizations truly reach a higher level of data center process maturity and deliver IT services in complete alignment with business objectives.

We like to think of the impact on the data center as similar to the impact of a good editor (an analogy you may or may not find ironic right about now). A good editor not only reduces the number of words in a written piece; a good editor puts the remaining words to better use to improve the written text. That’s what good DCSM practices can do—reduce energy consumption, heat densities and space requirements while improving the overall operation of the data center.