data center maintenance

In the broadening data center cost-saving and energy efficiency discussion, data center physical infrastructure preventive maintenance (PM) is sometimes neglected as an important tool for controlling TCO and downtime. PM is performed specifically to prevent faults from occurring. IT and facilities managers can improve systems uptime through a better understanding of PM best practices.

To free up staff resources to focus on strategic business initiatives, many IT leaders are considering engaging a partner to handle ongoing data center maintenance and optimization. But, too often, data center management services fall short of expectations. Standard care services may be limited in scope, and may not support the range of legacy hardware already in the data center. Conversely, complex managed or outsourced services may involve a costly, fully-customized engagement, in which costs are unpredictable, and control is wrested away from the enterprise. Finally—and perhaps most importantly—many data center management service providers seem to lack the innovative spark that will ensure continuous improvement to data center operations.

As businesses plunge into the digital future, no asset will have a greater impact on success than data. The ability to collect, harness, analyze, protect, and manage data will determine which businesses disrupt their industries, and which are disrupted; which businesses thrive, and which disappear. But traditional storage solutions are not designed to optimally handle such a critical business asset. Instead, businesses need to adopt an all-flash data center. In their new role as strategic business enablers, IT leaders have the responsibility to ensure that their businesses are protected, by investing in flexible, future-proof flash storage solutions. The right flash solution can deliver on critical business needs for agility, rapid growth, speed-to-market, data protection, application performance, and cost-effectiveness—while minimizing the maintenance and administration burden.

Codero required a top-notch Tier III data center facility. Furthermore, it needed a data center that could not only deliver disaster recovery services and support the ongoing growth of customer businesses, but do so with competitive rates for power and labor, and low exposure to natural disasters. Find out why they selected Digital Realty.

Old Dutch Foods, known for its broad selection of snack foods in the midwest United States and Canada, was struggling to get the right products to the right places at the right time. Its data center included outdated physical servers, and batch processing meant that inventory would not be updated until the end of the day as opposed to real time. In addition, recovering from power outages and disk failures could frequently take up to two weeks. To modernize its data center, Old Dutch Foods invested in EMC Converged Infrastructure. The fast and easy deployment of two VCE VBlock® systems running JD Edwards, MS Exchange, mobile device apps, and operation of a backup site with replicated applications and data. This enhanced the IT department's responsiveness to the business, allowed them to shift to real-time inventory, and reduced CapEx and OpEx costs. Operations were simplified by reducing person-hours needed for infrastructure maintenance by 75 percent.

According to industry analyst IDC, the mean cost of an hour of downtime can range from USD 224,952 to USD 1,659,428, depending on the size of your organization.1 And each instance of downtime increases your total cost of ownership (TCO) and eats away at your IT budget.

The core technology behind Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) has evolved for decades. More recently, DRaaS has linked to the cloud, and finally hit its stride. Today it can provide unprecedented availability options to companies who don’t have secondary data centers dedicated to business continuity. Before now, only IT teams with additional IT budget, staff and geographic locations could effectively hedge against downtime, and disasters. But today’s DRaaS means that businesses of all sizes have the peace of mind that comes with knowing a replica of their data and systems is hosted at a remote site that they can fail over to—without bearing any of the infrastructure costs or maintenance responsibilities. All infrastructure and maintenance is the responsibility of the DRaaS provider. And the technology ensures that a replica is not only available, but always current and immediately available. This attractive value proposition led Gartner to predict that global DRaaS revenue will rea

This paper explains how seven trends are defining monitoring service requirements and how this will lead to improvements in data center operations and maintenance.

Today’s data center power and cooling infrastructure has roughly 3 times more data points / notifications than it did 10 years ago. Traditional data center remote monitoring services have been available for over 10 years but were not designed to support this amount of data monitoring and the associated alarms, let alone extract value from the data. This paper explains how seven trends are defining monitoring service requirements and how this will lead to improvements in data center operations and maintenance.

IT has never been more important to doing business, which means that IT infrastructure must be simpler, smarter, faster, more flexible, and more business-aligned than ever. New service delivery models are driving new Tier-1 storage requirements that reveal how the traditional focus on performance and availability are clearly not enough to support virtualization, ITaaS, and new cloud service delivery models. The world is moving rapidly towards a New Style of IT, and will leave behind any business that doesn’t adapt even more rapidly. Is your storage ready? Download this whitepaper now.

A high percentage of today’s data centers use water-based cooling methods. Although evaporative cooling, whether through traditional towers or “advanced” adiabatic cooling systems (aka swamp coolers), remain highly effective cooling methods, when you’re planning a new data center you may want to consider the impact of the weather and water availability on your decision.

The demonstrations included in this menu interface show how IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager solutions can help you manage the complete life cycle of your data center and distributed resources from initial provisioning to patching and configuration maintenance to resource re-purposing or end of life.

SimpliVity’s solution is a great fit for today’s midmarket data center. This hyperconverged infrastructure simplifies an otherwise complex system that would require frequent maintenance and upgrades. SimpliVity offers an affordable solution that addresses major challenges of midmarket I&O teams.

70% of data center outages are directly attributable to human error according to the Uptime Institute’s analysis of their “abnormal incident” reporting (AIR) database1. This figure highlights the critical importance of having an effective operations and maintenance (O&M) program. This paper describes unique management principles and provides a comprehensive, high-level overview of the necessary program elements for operating a mission critical facility efficiently and reliably throughout its life cycle. Practical management tips and advice are also given.

In the broadening data center cost-saving and energy efficiency discussion, data center physical infrastructure preventive maintenance (PM) is sometimes neglected as an important tool for controlling TCO and downtime. PM is performed specifically to prevent faults from occurring. IT and facilities managers can improve systems uptime through a better understanding of PM best practices. This white paper describes the types of PM services that can help safeguard the uptime of data centers and IT equipment rooms. Various PM methodologies and approaches are discussed. Recommended practices are suggested.

When working with data center and commercial facility electrical systems, shocks of 100mA to more than 2,000mA are possible—definitely in the realm of serious harm to humans and property. Energized electrical equipment also presents the risk of arc flash caused by electrical faults that produce powerful explosions. When dealing with commercial and industrial electrical systems, such as uninterruptible power systems (UPSs) and their batteries, data center and facilities managers need to be aware of these risks, especially since some repair and maintenance procedures require working with a unit that is still energized. There are ways to minimize the risks to employees, equipment and the field technician performing the service. This paper answers some common questions about UPS maintenance, how to reduce the risks associated with servicing UPSs and batteries, and how to qualify a UPS service provider.

Buy-and-hold strategies can actually add costs to the datacenter, as systems age in place. Not only do hardware maintenance and software maintenance fees rise, over time – but the aging of applications also costs the organization money. Investing in a transition from POWER5 to POWER7 resulted in a return on investment (ROI) of more than 150 percent over three years.An insightful and and compelling discussion by IDC that reviews the primary reason for maintaining current systems -- Return on Investment. IDC studied IBM Power Systems sites that remained on the POWER5 platform long after its initial introduction in 2004. When comparisons to the succeeding generation of POWER7 are made, customers have found that the increase in scalability and performance of POWER7 systems, combined with a reduction in server "footprint" size and overall electrical requirements, resulted in significant reductions in ongoing costs, or opex, per 100 end users supported.

The data center infrastructure is central to the overall IT architecture. It is where most business-critical applications are hosted and various types of services are provided to the business. Proper planning of the data center infrastructure design is critical, and performance, resiliency, and scalability need to be carefully considered. Another important aspect of the data center design is the flexibility to quickly deploy and support new services. Designing a flexible architecture that can support new applications in a short time frame can result in a significant competitive advantage. The basic data center network design is based on a proven layered approach that has been tested and improved over the past several years in some of the largest data center implementations in the world. The layered approach is the foundation of a data center design that seeks to improve scalability, performance, flexibility, resiliency, and maintenance.

Private cloud technologies have proven themselves in large data centers and hosting organizations. The ability to quickly deploy new virtual machines, make configuration changes to virtual machines, live migrate virtual machines to different hosts before performing maintenance on physical components, and other benefits like this have cut operational expenses.

Most enterprise datacenters are so cluttered with individually constructed servers, including database servers, that staff time is largely taken up with just the maintenance of these systems. As a result, IT service to business users suffers, and the agility of the enterprise suffers. Integrated systems represent an antidote to this problem. By dramatically reducing the amount of setup and maintenance time for the applications and databases they support, integrated systems enable the technical staff to spend more of their time supporting users and enabling the enterprise to thrive.

Many firms are embarking on ambitious data center optimization projects to significantly reduce cost in hardware, maintenance, licensing, rack space, cooling and power – only to realize they are lacking fundamental data about their environment. Learn how you can accelerate and de-risk your data center optimization initiatives.

Download this whitepaper to learn how to achieve secure access to any server or network device from a single interface.

Buy-and-hold strategies can actually add costs to the datacenter, as systems age in place. Not only do hardware maintenance and software maintenance fees rise, over time – but the aging of applications also costs the organization money. Investing in a transition from POWER5 to POWER7 resulted in a return on investment (ROI) of more than 150 percent over three years.An insightful and and compelling discussion by IDC that reviews the primary reason for maintaining current systems -- Return on Investment. IDC studied IBM Power Systems sites that remained on the POWER5 platform long after its initial introduction in 2004. When comparisons to the succeeding generation of POWER7 are made, customers have found that the increase in scalability and performance of POWER7 systems, combined with a reduction in server "footprint" size and overall electrical requirements, resulted in significant reductions in ongoing costs, or opex, per 100 end users supported.

Buy-and-hold strategies can actually add costs to the datacenter, as systems age in place. Not only do hardware maintenance and software maintenance fees rise, over time – but the aging of applications also costs the organization money. Investing in a transition from POWER5 to POWER7 resulted in a return on investment (ROI) of more than 150 percent over three years. An insightful and and compelling discussion by IDC that reviews the primary reason for maintaining current systems -- Return on Investment. IDC studied IBM Power Systems sites that remained on the POWER5 platform long after its initial introduction in 2004. When comparisons to the succeeding generation of POWER7 are made, customers have found that the increase in scalability and performance of POWER7 systems, combined with a reduction in server ""footprint""