All about Data Center Management - Best practices and Challenges

In today’s digital age, data centers have become the backbone of many businesses. As a result, effective data center management has become critical to ensure business continuity, efficiency, and security. However, managing a data center can be a daunting task, given the complex infrastructure and constantly evolving technology. In this blog, we will explore some best practices and challenges associated with data center management.

What is Data Center Management?

Data Center Management is a set of day-to-day tasks and activities that an organization handles to operate a data center, and oversee technical and IT issues. Data Center Management plays a very crucial role in protecting your data and securing it from breaches. 

Data centers are very complex and contain components that need to work in unison to support your business and customers. It consists of hardware, software, physical infrastructure and services. There are many types of equipment on the hardware side, that need to be managed for smooth ongoing operations. 

Data center management primarily includes the following: 

• Application management for service and product delivery 
• Managing the IT infrastructure to support the applications
• Managing technology platforms for enabling service capabilities
• People to manage and support the infrastructure, platforms and applications
• Practices to support business and customer outcomes, manually or automated
• Managing data distribution and storage
• Managing backup policies and contingency planning

Best practices for data center management

The data center is typically managed in a three-layer approach which includes–Monitoring, Analyzing and Automating

Datacenter Monitoring involves overseeing and visualizing the activities and details across all locations and systems. 

Analyzing includes examining the utilization of data centers and how to make it more energy efficient, save space and increase the utilization of the existing equipment. 

Automating comes at the execution level for synchronized management across facilities, systems, IT hardware, applications and networks. 

What this three-layer approach does is: 

• It ensures high connectivity fidelity 
• Support longevity and sustainability 
• Ensure data access to users and power availability to servers
• Ensure adaptation of new technology and business demand
• Guard against unauthorized access and unknown threats

The best practices that help business to build and maintain a data center are:

• Measuring data and accurate logs of assets in the data center
• Power usage effectiveness is a critical metric for efficiently managing data centers
• Cooling or optimized airflow management techniques 
• Backups for an efficient system
• Predictive and proactive maintenance 
• Right deployment of DCIM(data center infrastructure management) technology 

Challenges of Data center management 

While data centers are one of the most sophisticated infrastructures, they also suffer from inefficiency, low equipment utilization rates, etc. One of the major problems is security. Each component of data center application, infrastructure, network, platform, and service is subjected to security threats from various internal and external sources. The data also are subjected to threats of theft, alterations, loss, misuse, etc. 

Apart from the technical difficulties of managing and maintaining a data center, another challenge that becomes a difficult task for organizations is finding a good data center operations manager. Having an efficient human IT staff to handle the software and hardware management operations is very important. 

Other significant challenges faced are:

• Managing current resources to meet customer demand
• Business loss and customer dissatisfaction
• Downtime cost- personal and productivity 
• Real-time reporting of data 
• Govt restrictions 
• Managing power utilization 
• Technology advancement
• Recovery from disaster
• Scalability and supporting business outcomes 
• The financial challenge of reducing expenses 

Managing data centers is vital for businesses to keep up with the competition. This is also vital because users these days do not tolerate delays when it comes to finding the information they are looking for. A data center thus makes finding information businesses and customer need, quick and to keep up with the challenges that come you need a support system in the form of a data center management company. It not only helps you to manage and secure your data center but also helps you in establishing a robust system.