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Four ways to effectively manage data centers

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Deepa
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Amit Luthra, national manager, Storage and Networking Solutions, Dell

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Data centers are today considered to be the business centers of a company. Data centers hold a significant amount of the company's assets within it. Most functions of an organization including key segment of human activity such as energy, lighting, telecommunications, internet, transport security systems etc. are controlled by data centers.

Any break of these data centers can threaten the company's functioning, with regards to security/ privacy, compliance with regulatory norms and a smoother functioning of the organization.

Managing data centers however is tricky because of the advent of Big Data, a phenomenon that is only likely to get bigger and more complex with the popularity of technology trends such as cloud computing, social networking and mobile. At the same time, since an organizations' business productivity depends on its data centers, IT managers are under extreme pressure to make their data centers more efficient such that they function cost-effectively, efficiently and are long lasting.

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The good news for IT managers is that this can be achieved easily with a small change in behavior of planning and implementation.

Here are four simple steps that IT managers can use to increase the efficiency of their data centers to make it cost-effective, productive and long lasting:

1. Standardise hardware and software

Data Center efficiency begins with the standardization of its systems across the organisation's hardware and software and its various business units. While buying software or hardware, very often IT managers limit their vision to the immediate need of the company for a particular application rather than considering their overall strategy for the data center. This, over time only results in complexities associated with administering and maintaining diverse systems.

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Standardisation can apply in many areas. However at the foundation most of these cost effective solutions can be applied to four critical areas: Platform, Server, Networking & Storage and Communications. As companies continue to turn to virtualisation to meet their business needs, standardization becomes all the more necessary. Standardizing on one virtualization platform reduces management load, data center complexity, and training requirements.

2. Optimize Storage Use

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 the visibility into their storage environment, understand what applications are connected to each storage resource and exactly how much of the storage is actually being used by the application.

Once this level of understanding is obtained organizations can make an informed decision about how to reclaim underutilized storage and be used to predict future capacity requirements.

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The advancement in storage management solutions gives IT managers a chance to manage their storage requirements with ease. The next gen storage management tools enable a centralized, policy-driven approach to handling storage changes and configuration drift to help reduce operational costs while requiring minimal deployment and ongoing maintenance effort.

3. Simplify processes within the data center

By simplifying the way in which data centers function its agility is improved and unnecessary expenses are reduced. For simplification to truly occur in any organisation, it must transcend technology. It must start with the business processes that drive the need for applications and information.

Simplification with reference to data centers is a three-phase process: rationalization, consolidation and virtualization. Rationalization involves determining what the company needs for its operations and designing an architecture accordingly. Consolidation involves reconfiguring servers, networks, storage, and applications to accommodate the rationalized design and eliminate redundant hardware, software, and data centers. Virtualization involves separating physical resources from virtual processes and treating servers, storage, and networks as pools of capacity deployed as necessary.

4. Automate key functions in the data center

Once a standardised and simplified system is created for the data center, automation helps to further build on its efficiency. The most important benefit of automating a data center is that it reduces the operational complexity of managing virtual environments. Automation exploits the stateless pool of resources that virtualization creates, enabling workloads to borrow and return these resources on the fly. Automation also enables IT staff to continuously track the state of underlying physical and virtual platforms, which frees them to focus on strategic activities that support business goals

Automation and standardization bring consistency to the user experience, reducing unique errors within systems. Together, they simplify IT management and empower IT groups to better meet SLAs.

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