Managment of your Data Center
The management of a data center can vary a lot depending on which are the needs of every data center, but there will be always a list of points that we have to consider independently of our situation to offer a minimum of quality in our service:
1-Software/Hardware management: This implies taking care of the H/S of your network, keep it updated and track it, also keep informed about the evolution of these technologies.
2-Dependencies tree control: Decide and set which systems depend on which others, don’t make it randomly, choose wisely too guarantee scalability and redundancy.
3-Device monitoring: Keep information about all the devices in a log database, and set alarms to find unusual or undesired events.
4-Security management: Running backups and testing the security of your network is a must on a self-respectable data center business. If your money income comes from the computers, you shall regularly look for viruses and test firewalls.
5-Device discovery: identify which devices are present on the network.
6-User management: You can establish levels of access to your employees to guarantee that only the indicated ones do certain jobs.
7-Network performance analysis: Test regularly your network to know your limits and improve them.
8-Network perimeter intelligent adjustment: To much trust on some parts of the network it may be dangerous, segregate your network on several parts and analyse the traffic flow in and out to detect anomalies and make it easier to detect where they come from.
9-Standards management: Don’t let the human factor control the standards of your enterprise, program rules on your devices to do not accept anything else rather what your enterprise agreed to work with, i.e. some protocols, some programs or reboots.
10-Intelligent notifications: If a problem is detected, you don’t want to receive the notification by all the devices which detected it, otherwise it would become into an information flood, set your system to inform you just once.
Once we had developed an efficient work policy which can actually handle of this points, our network will be more prepared to face alterations, and will be easier to operate, this will be translated into more money in our pockets, as our customers will be happier with our service and we won’t need as much personnel as if we didn’t manage our network in a smart way. An easy way to appreciate that we are doing good our job is when we see that this points are growing and improving in our network:
1-We prevent problems that we used to have.
2-We work more efficiently, reaching the same amount of success than previously with the same work.
3-Security is always in a good shape.
4-We stay up to date, deleting problems of outdated material in our network.
This are some points that it’s easy to notice how they improve but actually there is plenitude more, that you can find on the internet, talking with your partners or simply asking to your customers.
As you know, we like to work with Arista, and they got a solution focused for network management that we liked, it’s called Zero Touch and it got two features that we will comment you a tiny bit:
Zero Touch Provisioning: it has many features but the one we loved it’s that this one upgrade and downgrade your OS automatically on the switches, saving hours of work to your technics. But not only with OS, you can program the devices to download certain software that you may want for them.
Zero Touch Replacement: This feature rapidly responds to any failure in your devices by replacing the job they were doing in other devices that are configured to. It’s very useful to grant the non-stop of the service of your network.
Although this was our recommendation, if you want to search for other alternatives, you should look for a DCIM, this is a data center infrastructure management, there is more than 75 vendors of this product in the world, and it can be used to control alerts, software, hardware and monitoritzation in the network of a data center. That’s all for today, keep looking to the future!
