Operational and environmental efficiency becoming key in the data center

Improving both operational and environmental efficiency is becoming an essential data center consideration.

By Max Burkhalter
April 3, 2012
Efficiency has become the operative term when describing the data center. According to a recent Bank Technology News report, the vast majority of IT resources are devoted to the data center. This leads to substantial budget, time and expertise investments all going in the same direction. Businesses are becoming increasingly aware of the data center's role as a critical element of the business and an extremely expensive location. As a result, it is essential that businesses streamline data center operations and improve every aspect of efficiency.

According to the news source, there are a few ways to accomplish this goal. On the operational side, businesses should work to apply commoditization, in a controlled manner, to their infrastructure. Essentially, organizations can improve data center efficiency by commoditizing as many elements of the infrastructure as possible. This makes it much easier to maintain hardware effectively, replace devices that fail and respond to general disaster recovery requirements.

At the same time, it is also vital that organizations overcome the temptation to commoditize everything. Instead, they need to pick and choose the systems that can be standardized and make sure they intelligently customize other hardware.

Virtualization is emerging as an operational and environmental efficiency tool, as the technology allows organizations to develop virtual machine infrastructure. The report said VM systems make the physical servers less important, allowing the organization to provision new systems just like they would turn on an application. This makes it much easier to manage the data center effectively while also allowing organizations to reduce the physical footprint of their facilities.

Data center operators should also focus on environmental efficiency, turning to sustainability initiatives whenever possible, the report said. An increasingly popular method for accomplishing this is to allow the facility to run at temperatures a few degrees higher than normal. This can lead to an increase in server failure, but the cooling savings far outweigh the costs of purchasing new hardware.

As organizations consider various sustainability options within the data center, console server infrastructure is an important consideration. A console server allows organizations to monitor and adjust the environmental conditions within a facility, among other things, through a central control platform that gathers readings from a variety of monitoring devices. The console server system can also connect with mobile control devices, allowing managers to control the data center from any location that can connect to the network.

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.

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