Sunday, February 28, 2016

Few Guidelines to Improve the Data Center Efficiency

“Great design is not just a solution; it is the elimination of the problem”

In today’s technical world people come with more ideas, out of which many are being implemented. For every problem, there should be a solution. So in this blog, I will share few solutions which can be used to overcome the challenges that are being faced in the data center.
  • Due to the lack of trained employee’s, data centers face more issues on resource management area. So people need to be educated more on areas like data center operation and management. By doing so, we can also eliminate the dependency on a particular resource. There is a permanent solution which is to automate the tasks which are being done manually. This would significantly reduce the need for resources. 
  • Another major challenge that are being faced in data center is the lack of storage area. To overcome this, storage virtualization would be the effective solution as virtualization significantly increases storage capacity utilization. It can be used to,

o   Combat exponential data growth.
o   Increase the utilization of existing storage assets.
o   Reduce storage capital expenditure (capex).
o   Reduce Operating Costs (opex) and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).
o   Simplify storage management.

(Virtualization)  
                                                                                                       
There are three key properties of virtualization. First is Partitioning, where we can run multiple operating system on one physical machine and fully utilize server resource. Second is Isolation, where faults and security are isolated at virtual-machine level and dynamically control CPU, memory, disk and network resources per virtual machine. And the third property of virtualization is Encapsulation, where we encapsulate the entire state of the virtual machine in hardware-independent files and re-use or transfer whole virtual machines with a simple file copy. 
  • High Energy consumption is the next major problem which is being faced by the data center managers. First, by decommissioning the unused servers, the list of unused server should be found and retired, which helps in decreasing the electricity consumption. According to the Up-time Institute, decommissioning a single 1U rack server can annually save $500 in energy, $500 in operating system licenses, and $1,500 in hardware maintenance costs. Secondly, it is the consolidation of lightly utilized servers by combining applications onto a single server and a single operating system instance. Also server clustering reduces the number of backup or standby servers needed by a system, which improves availability and uses hardware more efficiently.


Above are few steps that can be used to improve the efficiency of the data center.

In my next blog, I will share more insights on different aspects of data center. Stay Tuned...

Reference: Notes from Professor, William F. Slater, Data Center Architecture Course

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