Three Ways to Extend the Life of Your Outdated Data Center

When managing an outdated data center, there are improvements that may be out of the budget for your company. Keeping up with technology, equipment and servers are some of the most expensive updates you can make within your own facility. Other expenses, such as remodeling the actual building and keeping up-to-date with security, can add to the already tight budget. Justifying these improvements may be an issue for upper management, so here are three ways, according to Robert McFarlane from Shen Milsom & Wilke LLC, to extend the life of your data center without stretching your budget.

Facility Space: McFarlane suggests to clear out old servers that are not doing anything useful for your data center. If there are old servers just sitting in the racks, it is probably time to switch them out for new servers. Outdated facilities may have turned into storage units for companies, but if you clean out the unneeded materials and make small repairs, you could think about selling your space and outsourcing your data.

Staying Cool: We all know that keeping your servers cool will aid in avoiding disasters and ensuring uptime in your data center, and it can be difficult to run an efficient data center without keep the facility cool. McFarlane suggests to block any holes or openings in and between cabinets to avoid escaped air.

McFarlane also says that improved cooling efforts can be done by rebalancing the air flow. An onsite data center audit that includes facility measurements and a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model will help to identify any update needs. Computer room air conditioners (CRAC) units may not be useful depending on the size of your data center.

Know Your Data Center:  Some updates that are needed for your data center may only be short-term fixes.  Before spending any money, analyze your situation and find the best outcome for your company. Outsourcing your data center, working with vendors or even renting equipment may be the best solution for you and your staff, depending on what is required to make your data center compliant, effective and efficient.

Lifeline Data Center is a carrier-neutral data center that has a 99.995% uptime with disaster recovery center on site. If you are worried about downtime due to the outdated equipment in your current data center, consider outsourcing and letting us take care of your data.

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Other resources:

• N+1 Data Center Redundancy, read more
• What’s the difference between cloud computing and colocation?, read more
• Standards for the Telecommunication Industry: TIA-941 vs. the Uptime Institute Tiers, read more

Rich Banta

Managing Member at Lifeline Data Centers

Rich is responsible for Compliance and Certifications, Data Center Operations, Information Technology, and Client Concierge Services. Rich has an extensive background in server and network management, large scale wide-area networks, storage, business continuity, and monitoring. Rich is a former CTO of a major health care system. Rich is hands-on every day in the data centers. He also holds many certifications, including: CISA – Certified Information Systems Auditor CRISC – Certified in Risk & Information Systems Management CDCE – Certified Data Center Expert CDCDP – Certified Data Center Design Professional