Top 7 Data Center Management Challenges

Introduction

Data centers are anything but static. With the advancement in technology and changes to data center infrastructure, new challenges have been arising and the old ones continue to evolve. ‎In addition to the management of cooling, power, data storage, and load balancing, other data center challenges are driving spending on data center management tools to rise. Also, the construction and management of data centers also have opened the door to many data center specification issues. It can be seen that data center management and operation are facing many challenges.

Top Challenges in Data Center Management

The top data center issues are reflected in many aspects. They include several problems as follows.

Data Security

A consistent issue of data center networking challenges is data security. Data breaches can cost millions of dollars in lost intellectual property, private data breaches, and theft of personal information. Risk management and protecting the data stored and transmitted over the network are the primary concerns of every data center administrator.

Power Management

The most common causes of unplanned downtime are poor planning and UPS battery failure. As virtualization reduces the number of servers, the power consumption required for cabinets and racks continues to decrease. Despite the dramatic increase in efficiency, blade servers consume four to five times the energy of previous data storage technologies. This requires data center managers to avoid this by planning wisely and investing in the right UPS that can handle the expected load.

Capacity Planning

Maintaining optimal performance requires operating your data center at maximum capacity. Running out of capacity is a mortal challenge, so IT managers often set aside some fault tolerance to ensure the operation of the data center. Additionally, data center infrastructure management (DCIM) systems, as an efficient way to manage capacity, are also increasingly favored by managers. DCIM systems can be used to identify compute, storage, and cooling capacity, while also helping to manage data centers more efficiently and achieve full capacity, keeping data centers at risk within limits.

The Internet of Things (IoT)

The ability to remotely control sensors creates several additional problems for data center management. With the development of the Internet of Things and the massive growth of system data, data centers have to increase the bandwidth rate to preferentially process, store and analyze data streams. Therefore, new data center strategies such as edge computing must be adopted to control the amount of data.

Mobile Enterprise

Mobile computing and some personal devices are also further troubling data security in the data center. Company employees also need to be monitored and protected when they access critical business data through their devices to prevent data leakage. Also, data breaches require some extra protection when remotely wiping mobile device memory, tracking and locking lost or stolen devices. Mobile enterprise computing presents technical, organizational, and legal issues that data centers must ultimately address.

Real-Time Reporting

The traditional approach to IT monitoring, which involves using reports, has certain limitations. It can only show what has already happened and by the time it is analyzed, identified trends and predicted any instances of failure, it may be too late to make the right fix. Real-time reporting helps fill this gap by providing you with real-time data, alerts and notifications to handle failures in a timely manner.

Balancing Cost Controls with Efficiency

High efficiency and low cost are inherent contradictions of data centers. In data center management, it is not only necessary to ensure the efficiency, innovation, and flexibility of the data center, but also to control costs carefully. As a sustainable construction goal, green data center requires enterprises to strictly control the energy efficiency of data centers and enhance their sense of social and environmental responsibility. The currently developing virtualization technology can reduce the physical limitations of servers, storage, and network equipment on applications, solve the inefficiency problem caused by application configuration dedicated servers, and achieve load balance, thereby effectively reducing data center operating costs.

Conclusion

Seven top data center management issues are common challenges in the current data center development process. When planning and maintaining data centers, data center managers should accurately and reasonably design data center specifications, and take data security, power, capacity, efficiency, and other related issues into consideration, using DCIM system and virtualization technology to improve data center operational efficiency.