Popular strategies to minimize data center costs

Data centers, in-house or outsourced, provide companies with an opportunity to streamline their digital storage needs. This practice becomes less prudent when the costs of managing data storage grows unmanageable. Firms will need to enact cost-saving strategies as their total data storage begins to expand. Costs can be cut by upgrading cooling, hardware, and infrastructure management.

Improve Cooling
Real-time temperature monitoring is the first step towards making cooling more efficient. Thermal and power monitors can identify cooling system errors as they happen and prevent excessive costs due to a hardware breakdown. Data Center Knowledge reports that data centers can cut costs by up to 15 percent by locating and addressing idle servers. High-end power monitors can even make real-time corrections to fan speed and power distribution as temperature fluctuations are detected. Finally, data centers can increase efficiency by adjusting ambient temperature. Highly-efficient networks can operate at higher temperatures and reduce the need for a chilly storage environment.

Rationalize Hardware
InformationWeek recommends that companies re-evaluate the functionality of all their current hardware. More tasks can be completed virtually so the need for equipmentsolutions has declined. This streamlining of infrastructure can reduce maintenance and upgrade costs by over $400 per server, per year. The InformationWeek article also suggests consolidation of servers into smaller, faster data storage units. Servers that used to take up entire rooms can now be consolidated into the space of a closet thanks to advances in storage technology.

Utilize Middleware
Middleware is a software/hardware application that acts as a go-between for several different types of programs or systems. Data center infrastructure managementis the most popular type of middleware used in the data storage industry. FacilitiesNet notes that the appropriate middleware installation can help to monitor power usage and allow for greater communication across different systems. The data collected by a DCIM is also useful for evaluating cooling and hardware efficiency. DCIM programs are perfect for integrating multiple systems connected through a serial port server.

No two systems are unique. That's why businesses should do plenty of research before jumping into an efficiency strategy. While the right middleware will save a company money, the wrong middleware could result in wasteful overlapping of resources. Rationalizing hardware from the start will help to elucidate the holes in a company's tech and storage capabilities. This evaluation can then be used to measure the benefits of middleware and cooling upgrades.

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.