Operational efficiency a key theme in data center innovation plans

Waste is extremely common in the data center. In some cases it will take the form of systems being left in place, despite the fact that they run inefficiently and don't really meet business needs, because the facility cannot support a hardware refresh. In other instances, operational inefficiency will abound because an organization has to focus so much on stability that it wastes resources that could be bet placed in other areas.

A recent InformationWeek report explained that data center leaders like Google and Facebook have been using emerging operational and technological models to integrate cloud-like functionality into their data centers. More businesses are starting to take notice and there is an undercurrent of innovation emerging in enterprise IT environments.

Innovation in the enterprise data center
According to the news source, the entire data center industry has long been dominated by efforts to emphasize stability over all else, but organizations are increasingly focusing on efficiency and business-IT alignment instead. In leading data centers like those run by Google and Facebook, this takes the form of raising facility to temperatures to reduce cooling costs, taking on open compute architectures and reducing power use efficiency.

There are still barriers to such plans in the typical enterprise data center, but many IT leaders are beginning to embrace some of these innovative strategies as they work to support changing business demands. Aggressively pursuing virtualization projects is one of the clearest examples of this movement, as the effort to virtualize more elements of the data center is a clear indication of a move toward cloud-like functionality. At the same time, the report noted that many software and application vendors have not yet certified their solutions to run in hypervisor environments, creating a major roadblock to large-scale virtualization strategies.

Taking innovation beyond the hardware
Many of the infrastructure upgrades coming in the data center emphasize becoming more responsive and efficient in regards to meeting business requirements. Making investments in solutions that streamline operations can also deliver benefits in this area. Console management systems, in particular, can play a huge part in enabling businesses to interact with the data center in a more streamlined way. Console servers enable remote management of the data center, allowing IT teams to respond to business demands without having to travel out to data centers or physically interact with systems.

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.