POWER
Best practice guidelines Monitoring Data Centre Power By Edwin de Boer, Director of Channel Marketing, Raritan
Proper data centre monitoring could assist owners and operators to manage an upcoming period of technological, corporate and legislative change.
While it is clear that most owners and operators have taken the mantra of ‘you can’t manage what you don’t measure’ to heart, it is also clear that the speed of change across data centres worldwide is fast exposing the inadequacies of some past practices. This article has been written to
indicate best practice guidelines in future-proofing when monitoring data centres. It uses a survey of upper-level data centre owners and operators to describe current practices in monitoring and reporting across this segment of data centres, as well as where improvements are looked for from current practices.
Industry Concerns Monitoring in data centres responds to key industry concerns for energy consumption, availability and costs, maintaining an optimal environment for IT equipment and for coping with increasing total cost of ownership. These concerns are not going away
and trend data indicates they will continue to impact adversely upon data centre operation. Therefore, monitoring needs to identify remedial actions swiftly and accurately, as well as being able to cope with new and future requirements, most obviously new reporting and metrical standards. The vast majority of data centre
owners and operators are monitoring energy consumption, temperature and humidity across all their facilities usually on a ‘continuous’ basis. Energy efficiency, carbon output
and power quality are also monitored but with greater tendency to do so irregularly and only within the primary facility.
Flexibility As data centres become more networked and delivery becomes focused more on the portfolio and less on the individual facility, so monitoring systems will need to offer sufficient flexibility in monitoring new variables and/or extending into new facilities. Reporting on data obtained
16 NETCOMMS europe Volume II Issue 4 2012
through monitoring follows no set pattern between using the data purely to warn if a threshold is exceeded, reporting that is compiled manually, reports that are generated automatically and more sophisticated modelling and analysis applications. In some cases, reporting appears to be led by what the technology is able to deliver rather than what the facility may require. Reporting is critical in translating ‘data’ to actions and low confidence with this stage of the process emphasises the need for monitoring and reporting to be considered of strategic importance to the data centre. Levels of satisfaction with monitoring and reporting are at best
n Totally satisfied n Not very satisfied
‘subdued’ although the linking of these processes to a formal process of continual improvement does much to improve satisfaction levels. Increasing satisfaction and confidence in data centre monitoring has as much to do with organisational expectation and organisation of the systems in place as with technological excellence.
‘Best practice’ in relation to monitoring has enabled operators in this sample to integrate it more seamlessly into the requirements their data centre is designed to fulfill and to the corporate processes that support and direct the data centre. As the data centre becomes a
dynamic facility where considerable
n Reasonably satisfied n Not at all satisfied
4% 14% 18%
64%
Aggregated Satisfaction with Monitoring Process
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