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Conquering the Challenges of Managing a Data Center
Ensuring high availability is the biggest challenge faced by CIOs while managing their data center and about 50% of them have outsourced some of the monitoring and management to a third party. Here we explore these and other data center mgmt challenges in detail
Sanjay Majumder
Monday, May 14, 2007
Over the last few years, we have seen the number of data centers growing at an exceptional rate. The term data center brings to mind a picture of a highly secure room spread over acres of land, with organized cabling infrastructure, extreme cooling and dedicated power house. Well, in reality things are slightly different. A data center, in simple terms is nothing but a place that holds your data, IT infrastructure and applications. In the early days, there was no term called 'data center', as such. There were server rooms where all the servers were kept and managed by an expert IT team. With the 'Dot com' boom, emphasis on datacenter has risen at a phenomenal rate. Initially, these data center facilities were constructed by ISPs for hosting applications, servers etc, for their clients. These days, each and every enterprise has its own data center in place. But on the other hand the complexity of managing these data centers efficiently has also become a challenge for the CIO. Therefore, we decided to find out the key data center management issues faced by CIOs and try to find answers for them. For this, we interacted with 28 key CIOS from across the country.
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Understanding the key challenges
52 % of the respondents said that ensuring high availability was the most challenging task for them. Around 24 % respondents said capacity planning was their key concern. While 10 % of the respondents primarily faced issues like keeping costs under control, the remaining 14 % said ensuring optimal utilization of resources was their prime challenge. To ensure high availability, you need to have redundant power backup. Secondly, data center should adopt network load balancing along with DR so that stress on the data center can be minimized. For the critical applications running in your data center, also you should have an automatic fail-over setup. Build redundancy into all the possible elements that can affect high availability, for example, switches and routers. If you think, you don't have enough trained staff to provide high availability then better outsource the management of your critical apps. To combat the issue of capacity planning, one of the options suggested by some of our respondents was server consolidation. One of the requirements for doing a successful server consolidation is monitoring your IT resources and then formulating the strategy. Broadly speaking, server consolidation translates into IT resource management. If you think that your current data canter can't take load of your upcoming projects then only you should revamp your data center (DC) or if you don't have enough time and budget then outsourced DC would be a better option. Virtualization is another solution for capacity planning. It taps the unused processing power of the servers in your data center. Moreover, with virtualization, you can add more apps in the same environment in order to utilize unused server power for efficient resource management. This will also help other concerns like ensuring optimal utilization of resources and keeping costs under control.
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Key management concerns
Power concerns top the list, followed by crash and recovery. There are also connectivity related, cooling and data backup issues. Let's take these issues one by one. Yes, power is the basic need for a huge data center, moreover as your data center grows you would require more electricity in order to power your infrastructure. Here also, capacity planning plays a major role. One has to evaluate the present and future power requirements for a data center. Then deploy a power conditioning system for your DC, which includes UPS and indigenous power generation unit. These days, many organizations have their own power generation units for powering their data center grid. Next you may face crash recovery issues. For instance, if any of your mission critical applications fail due to hardware failure then what would be your recovery strategy to bring back the application with minimum down time. In that case, keep your hardware and spares ready in stock, so that you can just replace the hardware and host the application on a new piece of hardware. Connectivity issues are another common area of concern that CIOs face, while managing their data centers. In fact, one interesting aspect that came up from our survey was availability of network equipment. What if one switch fails somewhere in your large data center? How quickly would you be abe to find and rectify it before something disasterous happens? For this, you need real time monitoring of the networking equipment and failover support for the most critical ones.
Data centers have a lot of servers and other equipment that generate huge amount of heat as well. As the temperature rises, it adversely affects the performance of the data center, plus chances of wear and tear of equipment also increase. Therefore, cooling plays a very important part in your DC. Before building a DC, you need to analyze your cooling requirements and design your DC accordingly. For your existing data center, you should put in temperature monitoring and control equipment. One of the respondents said that for additional cooling on demand, you can also deploy emergency chillers.
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