By Stephen Benjamin, IT Director, Cadence Design SystemsÂ
As enterprise segment moves ahead on its technology adoption path, data center sits right in the heart of its IT ecosystem and adopting the right data center strategy holds the big key to better IT enablement for the enterprise. Whether it is a captive data center or a green field data center approach, enterprise needs to work towards creating better data center approach.
Here are some of the segments which should be looked at for adopting a better Data Center –
Power Monitoring
Power becomes a very important element for the success of a data center. And hence enterprise needs efficient mechanism to monitor power in a data center.
If an enterprise runs a data center, it should know and completely understand about the importance of power monitoring to help maximize uptime, increase capacity and improve cost savings. Efficient power monitoring gives operators greater transparency into the energy usage and overall efficiency of their data center operations.
Data center power monitoring systems can be a powerful tool to help achieve the overall initiatives in the facility. Selecting the right power monitoring system for your facilities current and future needs is an important part of the selection process. Implementation and integration of the power monitoring system are steps that can be easily overlooked, but they play a big role in the effectiveness of the facility.
Flexibility, adaptability, accuracy, communications, and device functionality are important characteristics of a successful power monitoring system.
All-Pervasive Ethernet Fabric
As large enterprise move towards embracing true next generation data center capabilities, Ethernet fabric is increasingly becoming an important element to achieve this. Ethernet fabric gives great flexibility to a data center environment.
While traditional approaches to data center networking cannot satisfy the scale, bandwidth, latency and cost points required for evolving data center software architectures. It is driving the implementation of Ethernet fabric in a data center environment today.
An Ethernet fabric provides a low-cost, high-speed, ultra-low-latency, loss-less and scalable network infrastructure for a data center. This is really future-proofing the investments for an enterprise.
Emergence of SDN
Software Driven Networking can drive Virtual Machines and add to the flexibility of a data center today.
The software-defined data center is one where all infrastructure has been virtualized, and the management of that infrastructure is completely controlled by software that is driven by policies.
All this is making the management of a data center much more easier and cost effective as well. however, it is always important for the enterprise IT teams to incorporate right performance for the critical services and it becomes an important element for data center management. And most importantly, they should work towards a mechanism to have proper data to proof that performance gain in critical services.
Open Source in Data Centers
Open source is always great, it is cheaper than the proprietary systems, but the most importance aspect of having open source is to clearly understand about the support. So while implementation of open source can be done in a data center environment, one should always look for getting proper support channels in place so that your services are not affected in case of any outage.
And hence, one way to implement open source would be to go for firmly tested versions of applications and hardware that is well tested and proven to withstand data center scenarios.
