flexibility is required in delivery, provisioning and planning, monitoring needs to follow a parallel course. This means moving from alert-based systems towards those that enable greater faculty control and predictability.
Best Practice Matters ‘Best practice’ data centre monitoring is important because as the data centre becomes more dynamic and sophisticated, decisions will be based increasingly on data and less on ‘hunch’. You need to be able to trust the data you collect and ineffective monitoring deployment may represent missed opportunities
n Totally satisfied n Not very satisfied
for greater facility efficiencies and cost savings. It is also important that you match monitoring and reporting to the requirements of your facility. In a number of cases observed in this research, less may in fact be more! Data centres will increasingly be required to provide accurate reports to external agencies.
Why Monitor? What do data centre operators hope to achieve from monitoring in their data centres? Different reasons are given for different monitoring profiles. Therefore, to answer this, the variables monitored in the data centre have been divided into three
n Reasonably satisfied n Not at all satisfied
distinct groups: Energy consumption, Energy efficiency variables, and Environmental variables. As the key concern among data
9% 19% 15%
centre owners and operators, energy consumption is monitored to maintain availability and to identify potential problems that may impact the availability, to validate energy bills, to follow guidelines and standards on energy consumption and to identify possible cost savings. The profile of environmental monitoring is focused more firmly on maintaining availability and warning of threats to that and, to a lesser extent, in identifying cost savings. It is noticeable that the core monitoring of energy consumption, temperature and humidity are rarely linked to compliance policy, or continuous performance improvement. This creates the problem that there is nothing ‘strategic’ underpinning monitoring activity and this will reduce the scope for such monitoring to contribute to decision making and planning. Reasons for monitoring reflect closely the key concerns of and challenges facing the data centre industry, in particular those related to energy consumption, operating temperatures and threats to uptime, total cost of ownership and, to a lesser extent, to meet compliance and policy requirements.
57%
Who Monitors What? Monitoring of any kind is virtually universal in this sample. 94 percent monitor energy variables (principally energy consumption, energy efficiency and carbon footprint) and 91 percent environmental variables (principally, temperature, humidity and cooling air flow). This high level of monitoring is
Satisfaction with Ease of Deploying Required Technologies (% Organization)
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not surprising given the ‘Fortune 500’ profile of respondents. Six in ten primary facilities are Tier III or Tier IV and 77 percent of facilities here are defined as mission critical to their organisation. Possibly the only surprise in these results is the handful of facilities where monitoring is not done – these tend to be older, lower
NETCOMMS europe Volume II Issue 4 2012 17
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