10 Tips to Optimize your Data Center

Data centers are one of the most important components of IT infrastructure and form the nucleus of the business. Owing to its importance, enterprises have to give due consideration to several aspects before working on the design and implementation of their data centers.

Reducing costs is by far the highest key objective of the data center managers, followed by improving service levels and responsiveness. In other words, IT organizations are laboring to do more with less. And this can easily be managed as a large number of creative data center managers are using a variety of cost-containment strategies that capitalize on heterogeneity to increase IT efficiency and maximize existing resources while keeping costs under control. Here are few ways which the organizations are adopting to optimize their data centers:

Increasing IT Efficiency

In IT organizations around the world, staffing remains a big challenge. And the problem exacerbates while dealing with multiple data centers. While organizations respond by outsourcing some IT tasks, a number of equally effective alternatives are also available. The most common of these strategies is to increase automation of routine tasks which will not only reduce cost but also frees IT to address more strategic initiatives.

Storage Management

A growing number of heterogeneous storage management tools automate daily and repetitive storage tasks, including RAID reconfiguration, defragmentation, file system resizing, and volume resizing. Advanced capabilities such as centralized storage management, online configuration and administration, dynamic storage tiering, dynamic multi-pathing, data migration, and local and remote replication enable organizations to reduce both operational and capital costs across data centers.

High Availability

High availability solutions such as clustering tools can also streamline efficiency by monitoring the status of applications and automatically moving them to another server in the event of a fault. These high availability solutions detect faults in an application and all its dependent components move automatically, shutting down the application, restart it on an available server, and connect it to appropriate storage devices while resuming normal operations.

 

Disaster Recovery

For disaster recovery purposes, these clustering tools can be combined with replication technologies to completely automate the process of replication management and application start up without the need for complicated manual recovery procedures involving storage and application administrators. These high availability and disaster recovery solutions also ensure increased administrator efficiency by providing a single tool for managing both physical and virtual environments.

Data Protection

Next-generation data protection can also be used to reduce the operational costs of protecting and archiving data as well as to meet internal SLAs and external governance requirements. With automated, unified data protection and recovery management tools available from a single console and used across heterogeneous physical and virtual environment, organizations can maximize IT efficiency.

Maximizing Resources

In addition to containing costs through increased IT efficiency, organizations are also implementing variety of technology approaches from virtualization and storage management to high availability tools to make better use of existing hardware resources.

Virtualization

Server and storage virtualization can be used to improve utilization of existing hardware, thereby obviating the need to buy additional resources. Of course, because virtualization introduces complexity into the IT infrastructure, organizations looking to fully realize the benefits of this technology while driving down capital costs are advised to also implement a management framework that provides architectural flexibility and supports multiple virtualization platforms as well as physical environments.

 

Storage resource Management

While storage capacity continues to grow, storage is often underutilized. To make better use of storage resources, organizations can leverage storage management technologies. Storage resource management, for example, enables IT to gain visibility into their storage environment, understand applications that are connected to each storage resource, and exactly how much of the storage is actually being used by the application.

Green IT Practices

Among the various strategies for meeting green IT directives, server virtualization and data deduplication are preferable. Data deduplication can decrease the overhead associated with holding multiple copies of the same data by identifying common data and reducing copies to a single entity. This, in turn, can have a dramatic impact on the amount of disk storage required for archiving purposes as well as the number of disks required for backup purposes.

Converged Infrastructure

A data center design that is able to overcome challenges and cater to the pressing needs of today's IT infrastructure is converged infrastructure. Intelligent infrastructure management helps companies to shift their IT focus from maintaining disparate devices in data centers to directing a single landscape of servers (both physical and virtual) and storage. This will enable better maintenance at lesser cost and with fewer complexities. Converged infrastructure consists of merging servers, power and cooling management, and networking equipment together thus helping enterprises to reduce cost.

In conclusion, an effective data center goes a long way. It should leverage the latest technology and processes to help organizations increase IT efficiency and maximize existing resources, thereby enabling IT to effectively do more with less, now and into the future.