4 Tips to Manage Data Center Complexity

With business applications contributing heavily to the increasing level of complexity within a data center, it is crucial to understand and adopt important measures to control the escalating costs and consequences owing to increased complexity. Let’s take a look at some of the best practices that should be followed to mitigate data center complexity.

• Have a deep, clear picture of your business platforms by analyzing your business processes and understanding dependencies. This non-computer activity has great potential to reduce long-term downtime and instances of miscommunication.
• Keep track of all the IT assets you have and who uses them. This analysis can be used to eliminate little used or retired systems, and help reduce cost of operation.
• With regard to backups, try to have a minimum number of standardized backups for whatever digital assets you have. This move will reduce capital expenditure as well as operating and training expenses.
• Use deduplication strategies to address the ever increasing demand for information, and subsequently reduce costs involved in backup of information. Implementing deduplication capabilities in archives dealing with applications that churn out huge volumes of data – for example Sharepoint and Exchange – can help in streamlining complexity levels.
• Rely on standardized backup applications and/or appliances to make the recovery and backup operations as fast and as simple as your recovery needs dictate. Test your recovery processes to increase your likelihood of successful recovery. Use the test results to further simplify the IT environment.

Are you paying attention to these details? Can you reduce your data center’s complexity?

Alex Carroll

Managing Member at Lifeline Data Centers

Alex, co-owner, is responsible for all real estate, construction and mission critical facilities: hardened buildings, power systems, cooling systems, fire suppression, and environmentals. Alex also manages relationships with the telecommunications providers and has an extensive background in IT infrastructure support, database administration and software design and development. Alex architected Lifeline’s proprietary GRCA system and is hands-on every day in the data center.