Data Center Management Through Careful Environmental Monitoring

Datacenter management activities are directed at improving the efficiency of IT and datacenter facilities functions within an organization

. This includes a gamut of duties such as monitoring computer performance, supporting virtualization and consolidation, supervising servers, network or storage and controlling energy usage and environmental factors like temperature and humidity at rack and server levels. Environmental monitoring is a major part of datacenter management. But the concerning factor is that although there are several datacenter management tools available in the market, most of them fail to provide sufficient visibility into datacenter environmental conditions. Moreover lack of planning and coordination on the part of the IT administrators, inadequate availability of necessary environmental sensors also leads to poor datacenter environmental monitoring.

Datacenter management for temperature monitoring

Datacenter growth has given rise to the issue of heat density. Because of the varying rack densities and the rack heat, temperature control on facility level becomes quite difficult. This results in the development of hot spots in one area and cooler spots in another. The use of temperature sensors can be useful to detect those hot and cold spots. Accordingly IT administrators can shift workloads and take necessary actions to avoid any equipment failure.

Large scales datacenters require uniform levels of cooling and in-row and in-rack air conditioning. And therefore it is advisable to install intelligent controls that can integrate into cooling and monitoring systems to help run data centers capably. For example an intelligent control can help track humidity status across all units within a datacenter. And in case it notices a high or low humidity reading from any of the sensors it closely monitors the situation and notifies the administrator to start the remediation process.

Leak and moisture detection as part of datacenter management

One chiller leak inside a data center can cause severe monitory damage and hamper enterprise functionality and productivity. Install leak detection sensors at all the leak prone sites within the datacenter to avoid any kind if any kind of water damage. Leak detection sensors can easily integrate into the central monitoring system to simplify datacenter management. In a big datacenter with several cooling areas, these sensors can highly beneficial in terms of monitoring and identifying areas of condensation and excess moisture.

Using varied sensors to optimize datacenter management

Deploying only temperature and humidity/leak sensors will not suffice. Efficient data center environment monitoring calls for the installation of various other tools like smoke or fire alarms, power monitoring systems, security sensors, etc. While fire alarms can be integrated into the data center monitoring system to prevent fire breakout, power tracking solutions can be used to evaluate the data centers Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE). Room and rack access sensors on the other hand can improve the overall physical security system of the datacenter.

Conclusion

Environmental monitoring controls should be deployed to enhance datacenter efficiency and minimize equipments downtime. Effective datacenter management requires complete automation and centralization of physical infrastructure components. This will allow for better utilization of resources and improved uptime capabilities.

by: Jenifer Sahn

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