Data Center Management

Hi everyone! Today we are going to talk about what does Data Center Management consist of. Management is one of the key factors when designing next generation Data Centers, since we need to assure that a centralised and efficient monitoring of the Data Center can be carried out. The aim of the Data Center Management is to achieve the minimum possible down-time of it and preventing from fatal failures. In order to success in this task, a good administrator needs to be conscious about the problems that might happen, because if so, the right information will be gathered and these issues can be anticipated and prevented. When talking about Data Center Management, we can identify three main groups: Data Administration, System Administration and Network, Security & Infrastructure Administration. Data Administration mainly deals with databases and tools related to it. The design of the data bases, the platform to be used (Oracle, SQL...), the creation and the monitoring of them are all performed by the Data Administrator. When a Data Center uses SANs (Storage Area Network) in its design, the administration of the SAN devices is also set in this group. System Administration involves activities related with the Operating Systems used in the Data Center. The main activities are OS configuration, monitoring, backups and management of active services. It is absolutely important to have a centralised point to perform all these tasks, so they can be carried out in an efficient, scalable way in scenarios like our case. A virtualised environment like ours and the majority of the new generation Data Centers is ideal to perform these centralised management and monitoring of the system. Finally, Network, Security & Infrastructure Administration deals with issues related with the physical infrastructure and the network status. Some main tasks to be mentioned are downlink detection, power supply failures, unauthorised access, security threats and malicious attacks. The Security area is accomplished with devices such as firewalls and Intrusion Detections Systems (IDS). For the other activities, the trend to use Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) tools have increased over this decade. DCIM is a set of technologies that helps the administrator to achieve his job, and highly reduces the operational cost. As before, virtualised and cloud-based Data Centers perfectly integrates with DCIM solutions, which centralise all the key information in one single point.  This information can be connectivity (physical & logical), server & rack status, resources load, power, heat and cooling, among others. Few years ago, HP announced the obsolescence of its DCIM software, but the company has been developing other tools than can execute the same functions instead. If you want to see the solution for our case that can be implemented with HP offerings, don't hesitate to check our next post!