Real-time Data Center Performance on Intelligent Dashboards

Dashboards have been introduced in some data center environments today. The data center industry is always looking for ways to innovate, and highly visual and sophisticated dashboards are now tools in some data centers, which will provide you with a unified view of all of the critical aspects of data center performance. You can see the status of your data center in real-time with the new generation of sophisticated business intelligence and performance dashboards. Let’s take a look.

Some of the leading global technology organizations have adopted the use of dashboards in their data centers, including:

Facebook has become famous for broadcasting its dashboard on a huge screen as you enter the reception area of its Prineville data center. All the performance indicators, such as PUE (power utilization efficiency), WUE (water utilization efficiency), humidity and temperature are displayed with near real-time accuracy, along with annualized average metrics to compare. What is even more remarkable is that Facebook has gone one step further to make its dashboard code open source so that other data centers can benefit from similar features.

Intel has also been working hard to redefine its data center strategies, and it has reported $184 billion new business value in the last four years. A key feature of their new strategy was to build an integrated business intelligence-based dashboard that reports metrics at both system and component levels. The dashboard consolidates data from all of Intel’s data centers by polling as much as 192 million data records. Metrics related to space, storage, power and cooling are visually displayed and can be compared among different business functions and different data center locations.

Simple or over-the-top complicated, data center dashboards can surely contribute to giving a holistic view and can help identify opportunities for efficiency improvement. While we don’t have dashboards yet, we are continuing to innovate in our data center and always have current metrics on our performance. To learn more, contact us for a consultation today.

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.