Management of a Data Center

Management is a crucial part building the next generation Data Center. Whitin the management scope, there are three main areas:

• System administration

• Data administration

• Network, security and infrastructure administration

These three areas are key for the correct management of a data center.

System Administration

This area includes mainly operating systems (OS) (Windows, Linux…), active services, software distributions, system configuration, backups and optimization.

Most of these systems are managed in a virtualized environment, which gives the administrator the ability to control and execute most of the task from a centralized software. We will discuss these solutions on the next post of this week.

Data Administration

This area includes data bases, such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL. Some of the main actives are, database design, creation and administration of those data bases, software administration and resources monitoring. If the data center has a SAN (Storage Area Network), the data administrator would take care of the devices involved in the SAN.

Network, security and infrastructure administration

This area includes the network and infrastructure of the data center. Some of the main activites are, searching for anomalies such as down links, electrical failures, security threats, unauthorized physical access and network overload.

To achieve their goals, network administrator make use of devices such as firewalls, IDS and DCIM. Depending on the size of the Data center, we could find several administrators in different sectors of the network in order of being capable of monitoring the network from a closer perspective.

DCIM

There are some technologies that help administrator do their job. One of the latest trend is de DCIM (Data Center Infrastructure Management). This type of management solution offers a great advantage regarding operational cost. This solution integrates deeply with the virtualized environment and the cloud. Moreover, the deployment of this type of solution is easy, whenever a good prior analysis is made.

The mail goal that the DCIM achieves is centralizing key information of the datacenter. By doing this, the solution gives  access to this crucial information to all administrator. a DCIM solution can control communications, servers, racks, storage systems and even power and cooling.

This type of solutions are key when taking split second decisions regarding the data center.