Management

By reading our posts, you can image how hard it’s design a data center because you have to take into consideration lots of different aspects; which devices use or the hypervisors or the pros and cons of using the cloud are some examples of the aspects already treated. Now it’s time to talk about management because you might have a perfect design, but, how are you going to mange the network and devices?

The management it’s not something you can take lightly because a bad management of the network or the devices can be the cause of data loss due to security breaches or the malfunction of the entire data center. Besides a correct data center management can provide of logs that, in case of any malfunction, will help us to know where the problem is and also it might give us an idea of how to solve it.

For that, on this post we’ll talk a little bit of how to correctly mange a data center. Besides, if you want to see a solution based on our provider we’ll do another post this week talking about it.

Before starting to talk about how to manage a data center it’s important to know the meaning of DCIM. This initials mean Data Center Management Infrastructure and its main goal is to provide administrators with a view of data center’s performance so each device, space and energy are used as efficiently as possible.

Thanks to DCIM tools is possible to quickly track all changes in the data center giving benefits such as: resilience, capacity and costs reduction.

DCIM can be a little bit generic when talking about managing a data center but there are other alternatives according to what specific area you want to manage. For example, if we want only to manage the network we can use the SNMP protocol.

SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) is a protocol used to collect and organize information about managed devices. The data provided can help to change devices behaviours so they can become more efficient.

We can also find other alternatives according to which provider you want to use. In our case, we haven’t decided yet which provider will be using to monitor and manage our data center but we’ve done our researches and we’ve find out that Brocade offers Brocade Network Advisor, Checkpoint offers SmartEvent and finally Oracle has  Oracle VM server.

We could be explaining different methods to manage a data center but there are plenty different solutions that can be useful. It’s important to know what you want to manage, the whole data center or just a specific area and then you can start looking for the solution that better fits with your requirements.

Hope you like it!!

Have a nice week and see you in future posts!