12 principles to make data centers perform better

As American football star Tom Brady once said, "If you don't want to win, don't play." This mantra is reflected in Brady's TB12 method, a holistic life cycle based on 12 principles that form a dynamic, safe approach to movement, training, and exercise. The premise is to stop events before they happen and take smart, strategic preventative measures. While it is not necessary to implement all 12 principles, their effects are cumulative: the more you can incorporate, the better your results will be.

While this approach is applicable to training high-level athletes, data center managers have their own set of principles to ensure optimal performance in the data center. Called the DCM10 approach, there are 10 basic steps that every data center manager should use to evaluate their current data center and help transform its capabilities. Similar to the TB12 approach, while not all of these steps are necessary to develop a successful strategy, applying more of the best practices will lead to higher performance.

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To achieve and maintain top data center performance, every data center manager should follow these 10 steps:

1. Leverage a hybrid environment

By using a mix of solutions for your IT infrastructure, you should gain better visibility and control to access critical insights. Whether on-premises, in a colocation data center or in the cloud, achieving peak performance means creating a flexible, scalable, sustainable and reliable data center to meet current and future business needs.

2. Optimize power and cooling facilities

Most enterprises using high-density servers are generating a lot of heat and consuming more power than traditional old-fashioned equipment. With new technological advancements, such as big data and machine learning, this power and subsequent heat increase will only increase. Since the power density of a typical rack ranges from 5kW to 40kW, data center managers need to develop new procedures and software to gain real-time insights that predict newfound cooling requirements.

3. Start thinking about green energy saving

In addition to monitoring power and cooling, data center managers should evaluate "green" alternatives to improve energy efficiency. By using renewable resources such as wind power or solar panels, companies can shift their data center strategy to include environmentally friendly practices and optimize their existing data center infrastructure.

4. Perform automatic health checks

Through continuous analysis, diagnostics and remediation, data center managers can conduct regular health management checks to address the risk of costly downtime and outages. By continuously monitoring data for anomalies or potential threats, enterprises can protect their facilities by planning and resolving any issues that may occur within the system to help automate business processes.

5. Take a proactive stance

In addition to regular health checks, real-time monitoring of your data center allows staff to prepare for the worst and take a proactive approach to any unforeseen threats, such as natural disasters. This means looking at everything from the day-to-day performance of your data center to developing a disaster recovery plan that could conflict with your data center.

6. Balance the budget

Without the best data center facilities and IT equipment, organizations may fall behind, directly impacting their business success. With only a portion of the IT budget dedicated to the data center, data center managers must first maintain a balance between functionality, efficiency, space and cost, and only implement smart upgrades that directly relate to the performance, reliability and agility of their data center.

7. Get buy-in from top management

One of the biggest disconnects in an enterprise's data center strategy is a lack of executive buy-in. To ensure a successful data center management deployment, the entire team (IT managers, system architects, and business executives) must work together to fully leverage the solution stack.

8. Evaluation management process

Organizations that deploy a data center management solution can automate areas of the change management process and keep a record of any changes made in the equipment. This means real-time visibility into how changes are managed, the impact of the change, and when the change was completed. For companies not using a DCM solution, this is a manual, time-intensive process that takes up valuable time from data center managers.

9. Ensure flexibility and scalability

Data center managers must be able to scale their deployments as needed, without being limited by current hardware or software. This means not having to worry about introducing new solutions, such as field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), that can tailor computing power to specific workloads or applications, thereby increasing flexibility and scalability.

10. Always at the forefront of the industry

Whether it’s adding edge computing to offload latency-reliant services or incorporating AI solutions to detect any issues, staying ahead of the curve is critical in today’s fast-paced business environment. While no one can predict what the future holds, modernizing your data center strategy will ensure that your business stays ahead, rather than one step behind.