Featured article by Keith Newton
A data center is a physical facility that keeps the organization’s equipment and shared information technology (IT) operations moving. Its main function is to store, process, and disseminate various data and applications. This makes them an essential part of an organization.
To keep pace with fast-moving business demands, data centers must be modernized to produce more efficient outcomes. Modern data centers are more complex than their traditional counterparts. They support growing amounts of data across a network of multi-cloud operations. Plus, they maintain strict physical and logical security protocols necessary to secure growing customer data.
The challenge of a progressing data center is how to improve its efficiency and efficacy. Factors to consider are the power efficiency and cooling capacity of the system, certainly a big struggle for most IT architects. Perhaps, this gives you an idea when to consider data center consulting services.
Here are comprehensive strategies to make your data centers more efficient and manageable:
1. Create A Modular Design
Data centers get more complex each year as new data and applications get added. Most of the added frameworks aren’t incompatible with current infrastructure. Switching to a modular design may enable your organization access to a flexible and simple system. It will also allow your IT architects to add or remove building blocks to ensure proper system flow.
When building blocks of data can be easily added or removed from the system, that’s when you achieve proper modularization. They aren’t only scalable on demand, but they also make data centers more manageable and interoperable with a single console.
Moreover, because of the installation of modular design, on-site employee hours are greatly lessened. This also reduces manual labor required during operations promoting the safety of your employees.
2. Practice Proper Data Hygiene
As companies continue to store vast amounts of data from their network, many of them were left unused. These data are usually redundant, obsolete, and trivial (ROT). According to experts, these data amounts to 33% of the data stored and processed by various organizations. It may cost up to USD$3 trillion to control.
With proper data hygiene, customers would be able to properly manage their ROT data and free some valuable storage for critical use.
Moreover, it can have beneficial impact to your IT infrastructure. Good data management allows your facility to allocate your storage resources efficiently and effectively. Furthermore, it could significantly reduce your equipment’s power and cooling demands
3. Shift To Hybrid
Hybrid IT infrastructure combines the benefits of private or public cloud services, and on-premises data centers. This allows an organization to balance and maximize the benefits of cloud-based infrastructures and on-premises environment at the same time.
Moreover, hybrid architecture allows the company to have a flexible network scaling, and to easily compute demand surges. It also offers the best of both worlds: performance reliability with agility, security, and cost savings across multiple cloud-based systems and on-premises data centers. This is the reason why experts say that hybrid is the future of data center management.
If you need help shifting to hybrid infrastructure, don’t hesitate to look for an IT service provider.
4. Break Down Silos
Growing amount of data and increasing functionality of data centers lead to the formation of different silos. These are isolated groups of data that most organizations aren’t aware of. Each silo is managed by specialized staff. Silos create separation and division within the system.
It may sound hard to eliminate them, but it’s actually not. Here are five basic ways to help you shatter down the silos:
– Prioritize Them: If you want them to be gone, you have to prioritize them. Start by developing a comprehensive plan. Make sure that all involved employees are aware of what’s going on.
– Encourage Team Communication: Most silos are created due to lack of team communication and collaboration between different areas. Establishing proper communication between your employees may help you get rid of those isolated data.
– Develop New Process For Data Storage: Improve your data storage processes by using the right tools and by frequent communication. Also, lessen the number of database where data are stored. This may cause confusion as to where different data must be stored.
– Avoid Expensive Vendor Lock-In: Vendor lock-in is a costly and time-consuming process of transferring data from one database to another. To prevent this, use a platform that will enable you to transfer a lot of data easily.
– Simple Infrastructure: Using several databases may form an endless cluster of data silos. To prevent this, simplify your system and only rely on databases necessary to store and process your data.
5. Organize Cables
Most organizations often stress the need to put limits on the use of cable within the network. Somehow, it’s quite inevitable. Cables are bulky and hard to manage. Each cable must be placed to its designated outlet to avoid system problems. If you’re going to use it in large-scale infrastructures, make sure that it’s highly organized.
The Bottom Line
With the advent of new technology, more data are being processed and stored in a blink of a second. Thus, the need for more stable, efficient, and cost-effective data centers to properly manage these data is on the rise.
Remember to use the strategies mentioned to improve the capacity and efficiency of your data center facility.
Keith Newton
Keith Newton is a professional data center consultant. He has been in the industry practicing his profession for more than 20 years. He inspires others through online symposiums and blogs. During his free time, Keith loves baking, reading encyclopedia, and traveling.
