3 Tips To Keeping Your Data Center Running Smoothly

Data centers allows businesses the opportunity to house their information together and manage everything more efficiently, but unfortunately they're also extremely easy to misuse. A large portion of data centers do not operate at their optimum efficiency, and many companies may not even realize it. If you haven't reviewed your procedures lately, then now is a good time to go over, in detail, exactly what you're doing. We'll give you several factors to keep in mind so you don't waste your company's time or money on electricity in your data center.

Environmental Tracking

Even small changes in air pressure, humidity and temperature can have a big effect on machinery, or contribute to a data center using electricity and power without producing anything useful. In order to minimize this wasted space effect, you'll want to 'track' the information through sensors located on the equipment or through advanced RFID (radiofrequency identification) tags. RFID is typically used by large-scale operations.  DCIM (Data Center Infrastructure Management) software will give the necessary readings back on your machinery whenever there is a change in either the atmosphere or the internal mechanisms of your servers. You can quickly develop a plan of action based on the information for how best to protect your investment and maximize your efforts, however you'll also need to use this piece of advice alongside a couple of others for best results.

Protocol

You likely already have procedures in place for basic events, but you may not be using your machines or remote staff properly. Having simple but detailed plans for a variety of commonplace situations can aid in everyone being on the same page with less time being lost. There are probably hiccups in your processes that arise often that you may not even notice because they seem 'minor' or larger problems that may not seem like they happen often. Examining how everything works together and what's costing you the most resources is crucial in running your data center at peak performance. Using the tracking devices correctly will help you figure this out to create plans that make sense. Ensure that your plans remain simple so they're much more likely to be remembered and implemented by team members and personnel.

A Physical Problem

As stated earlier, the loss of efficiency in the virtual world often comes from any change (big or small) in the physical world. You should have software that can not only track a data center's airflow as well as more abstract concepts like capacity and cost. These are typically engineering tools and can give you an overall look at how everything is currently being managed and what may need to change in the future should you need to expand or just give you a plan as to how the equipment or atmosphere needs to be treated as time goes by. Using Computational Fluid Dynamics software, you can analyze practically every morsel of data that you can extract. You just need to ensure that everything is properly calibrated and then you can monitor without having to by present or rearrange equipment.

This post is brought to you , thanks to Katrina  a leader in the IT industry custom solution and innovative ideas as a product specialist for RackSolutions