Data centers must overachieve to keep up with growing demands

IT experts are perpetually self-taught students, and the data center serves as their classrooms. New challenges are always around the corner, and IT staff must keep up with the curve by studying the latest trends in the industry. One such lesson being learned time and time again is that evolving technology will always introduce new demands for improved performance. According to TechTarget, this lesson was reiterated at this year's Dell World technology conference.

"For data centers, the idea that you need to be perfect will not be far from the truth," said practical futurist Michael Rogers during a seminar delivered at Dell World. Driven by the arrival of the Internet of Things, the era of perfect expectations is expected to become a reality as soon as 2020. With a stricter grading rubric just around the corner too far down the road, IT experts must undergo some serious studying if they expect to be prepared for these major upcoming tests. Making the right infrastructure investments can make this studying process significantly easier. Avoid cramming at the last minute by studying these helpful tips.

Investing in a remote data management solution is a necessity
While managing all of your company's data from a single data center offers perks in terms of convenience, this strategy also leaves the entire network vulnerable to a single natural disaster or critical human error. That's why Data Center Knowledge stressed the importance of deploying infrastructure across multiple availability zones. For example, offices in regions threatened by earthquakes should set up another data center in a location far enough to operate unaffected by any magnitude of earthquake impacting the flagship data center.

Simple tech investments, such as the deployment of remote console servers, turn data flow between two data centers into a streamlined operation. Taking this approach will guarantee reliable access to important business apps and private client information, even during an emergency.

Systems operating from multiple locations are less vulnerable to one outage
The best students know the importance of working smarter, not harder. Likewise, A+ data center experts are always on the lookout for ways to solve multiple problems with a single solution. One way to take this approach with regards to data center uptime is to leverage the redundancy benefits of Ethernet switch stacking.

By linking multiple standalone rack switches to operate as a single virtual chassis, IT experts can minimize the risk of equipment failure by shrinking the data center's rack footprint. The proliferation of line cards and power redundancies help make a single virtual rack less prone to downtime than each switch running independently. This infrastructure organization also makes it simple to establish multiple uplink paths between switches, routers and hosts. Increasing the entire data center's fault tolerance with these updates will go a long way toward operating a facility with 100 percent uptime.

IT departments must always be willing to learn.

Automation becomes necessary when IT uptime requires more focus and energy
It's a simple fact of nature that human beings can not be in two places at once. Though the efforts of some highly dedicated data center experts push this maxim to its limits, ultimately there is only so much that any one employee can do in a single day. As the maintenance necessary to keep the data center operational without fail grows more taxing and complex, IT experts will need to start diverting some of their attention from other projects. Automation makes it possible for this priority shift to take place without seeing performance declines in other parts of the data center.

For example, DCIM technology can be integrated directly into IT operations to streamline simple tasks that might collectively take up hours of a data center employee's work week. The right solution will depend greatly on the performance demands and infrastructure of the data center, but studying a solution for perfect uptime now will prevent data centers from being vulnerable to a pop quiz outage in the future.

Perle's wide range of 1 to 48 port Perle Console Servers provide data center managers and network administrators with secure remote management of any device with a serial console port. Plus, they are the only truly fault tolerant Console Servers on the market with the advanced security functionality needed to easily perform secure remote data center management and out-of-band management of IT assets from anywhere in the world.