Better Data Center management – do you have a facilities problem, an IT problem or both?

Data center management is complex. Whether it’s in-house, at a colocation facility, or multiple locations, it’s challenging to manage applications, operating systems, servers, storage, networking and facilities.

Companies are changing their data centers at a record rate. Higher data center uptime is often the reason. Data center power and cooling limits also push many companies to make a change in their data center. Many companies are adding another computer room to act as a disaster recovery center.

An unprecedented number of companies are visiting our Midwest colocation facility as they consider changes to their computing environments. Many of these companies are now dividing their data center responsibilities into two major categories:

Information technology – applications, operating systems, servers, storage, and networking

Facilities – hardened data centers, power, cooling, and physical security

These companies understand that the expertise required to successfully manage the IT responsibilities are very different from the power, and cooling expertise of data center facilities management responsibilities.

Here are the trends we see when companies talking to us about their data center management problems:

Mostly facilities problems – Companies consider wholesale colocation or data centers as real estate.

Combination of facilities and IT problems – Companies are using cloud computing and/or colocation facilities that offer IT services as well. Alternatively, some of these companies use wholesale colocation with third party IT providers.

Mostly IT problems – Companies hire outsourced expertise, use cloud services, or augment the existing staff for projects and ongoing support.

Where are your biggest data center management headaches: IT, facilities or both? How do you plan to solve these problems?

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.