Guide to Optimizing Your Data Center's Efficiency

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Guide to Optimizing Your Data Center’s Efficiency

Guide to Optimizing Your Data Center’s Efficiency
- By: John Rath
  March 11th, 2013
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The modern data center faces challenges from dynamic technology lifecycles and a demanding business environment. Evolving from server closets to multi-million dollar facilities, the modern data center incorporates a number of innovations that contribute to its effective and efficient operation. Facility and IT infrastructure must be agile and keep pace with the business, while maintaining mission-critical distinction.

To foster an agile, proactive approach towards facility and IT operations, data center owners and operators must adopt suitable engineering tools and techniques. Monitoring, management and simulation techniques help to:
- Understand the cadence of business.
- Function as a link to illustrate the efficiency of the data center investment.
- Identify, assess and determine the risk of vulnerabilities.
- Develop business and technical planning scenarios to deal with risk and uncertainty.
- Identify and mitigate lost capacity.
Using the right tools and techniques for the right job equates to monitoring, simulation and DCIM (Data Center Infrastructure Management) working in harmony to protect and sustain the data center investment. Using simulation techniques in a data center prior to or in production can identify conditions that lead to unnecessary costs, lost capacity, and service interruptions.

This paper will explore the value that monitoring, simulation and DCIM offer, and the additional value of integrating these engineering tools and techniques. It explores the importance of promoting an environment where IT and Facilities departments present a unified approach towards the data center. The engineering tools available to data center managers also present the risk of inaccu¬rate interpretations and unreliable forecasting. Finally, this paper explores the misnomer of perceived capacity, the complexities of capacity management, and having an integrated simulation platform act as a catalyst for re-gaining lost capacity in the data center.

Click here to downlaod this white paper on Optimization in the Data Center.
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About John Rath

John Rath is a veteran IT professional and regular contributor at Data Center Knowledge. He has served many roles in the data center, including support, system administration, web development and facility management.