Why is data center management getting harder and harder?

Many enterprise IT managers will find that as their own businesses grow, data centers become more and more difficult to manage, and even some enterprise IT managers feel that they are unable to manage their own data centers. Data center space, power, cooling, physical architecture and logical architecture between devices, procurement of new equipment and elimination of old equipment..., a series of problems have caused many IT managers to have a headache.

Back to the source of data center management problems

Why is the data center more and more difficult to manage? On the one hand, due to the rapid development of enterprise business, the rapid growth of the data center will inevitably bring about management challenges. After all, the network is large in scale and complex in structure, and the IT operation and maintenance work will definitely increase. At this time, if IT operation and maintenance If the experience and technology are not kept up, it will inevitably form a disconnect between IT development and operation and maintenance.

On the other hand, with the growth of the data center, the data center has accumulated a small amount of hidden problems in the past construction process, and finally formed an operation and maintenance bottleneck that the data center could not solve. It is like a person who is in a sub-health state for a long time. When the potential problems in him break out, they will not be a minor problem.

Speaking of this, some friends may not be convinced: "The development of each step of my data center is carefully designed by me. How can I leave problems and hidden dangers?" I slowly approached you. Explanation.

Hardware placement for data center management problems

The information construction of any enterprise is a process from scratch, from small to large, from simple to complex, from backward to advanced. In the initial stage of data center construction, IT managers are often accustomed to placing the same business-related hardware devices as close as possible for management convenience. Usually, servers, switches, etc. used in the same business system are placed in one cabinet. This kind of approach will not have any problem when the IT scale is small, but as the size of the data center increases, the number of cabinets increases, and if this hardware device prevention method is adopted, there will be a big problem.

We know that the space of the cabinet and the power provided by the cabinet are constant. To ensure the space and energy utilization of the equipment room, we must effectively utilize the space of the cabinet and the power of the cabinet. This requires that the data center hardware device prevention should be considered from the physical level of the data center. But as I said earlier, when data center construction begins, IT managers tend to subconsciously divide hardware devices into business logic. Moreover, when the space bottleneck occurs in the data center, people begin to consider re-planning the hardware of the data center from the perspective of the physical layer. However, at this time, the physical level adjustment of the data center has become a big project. IT managers need to think about how to keep critical business down or short-term downtime. It is necessary to consider how each cabinet should prevent hardware equipment. Re-arranging IT hardware has become a powerful data center upgrade project. We often say "the embankment of a thousand miles, destroyed by the ant nest", this is a typical example.

So we said that the data center is easy to accumulate a number of small problems in the construction process, and finally caused a big problem.

Data Center Management for Data Center Management Challenges

Ok, just raised the question, then we need to analyze the problem and solve the problem. In order to avoid such problems, it is very simple. That is, with the development of the data center, we must proceed from the physical level of the equipment room when the hardware equipment is placed, from the physical level of the equipment room, power and other physical aspects. Planning and design.

But at this time, new problems have arisen. There are many elements involved in the physical level inside the computer room, and many elements are more abstract. For example, the space problem, it stands to reason, how many square meters a computer room is a real number, but how to place as many cabinets as possible in this limited space, reasonable use of air conditioning and airflow cooling, this becomes A more abstract question.

There are a lot of abstract problems. We can think of the data center as a container. The indicators that measure how much this container can hold include space, process, power, cooling, and network interfaces. If we want to achieve a reasonable planning of the data center at the physical level, we must first understand these units, and then rationally allocate these units. To implement this step, you must materialize these abstract units. You must have a tool to materialize these abstract elements to help IT managers plan for the data center management. At present, there are many such tools, such as Avocent's AMIE, which can help IT managers better grasp the status of the data center, rationally plan the data center, and further improve the data center management.

Summary of Data Center Management

One day is wrong, thousands of days are wrong. The wire saw is broken and the water drops are worn. This is the truth that we have summed up for five thousand years. This truth applies equally to current data center management efforts. To avoid small mistakes in the data center construction process, we need to plan the data center from the perspective of physical level, and use reasonable tools to understand the physical units of the data center. If we do this, our data center management problems It will also be solved.