Data center management is the collection of tasks performed by those responsible for managing ongoing operation of a
data center This includes ''Business service management'' and planning for the future.
Historically, ''data center management'' was seen as something performed by employees, with the help of tools collectively called
Data Center Infrastructure Management
A data center (American English) or data centre (British English)See spelling differences. is a building, a dedicated space within a building, or a group of buildings used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunic ...
(DCIM) tools.
Both for in-house operation and outsourcing,
Service-level agreement
A service-level agreement (SLA) is a commitment between a service provider and a customer. Particular aspects of the service – quality, availability, responsibilities – are agreed between the service provider and the service user.
T ...
s must be managed to ensure data-availability.
Competition
Data center management is a growing major topic for a growing list of large companies who both compete and cooperate, including: Dell, Google,
HP,
IBM,
[ Intel][ and Yahoo.][
Hardware/software vendors who are willing to live with ]coopetition
Coopetition or co-opetition (sometimes spelled "coopertition" or "co-opertition") is a neologism coined to describe cooperative competition. Coopetition is a portmanteau of cooperation and competition. Basic principles of co-opetitive structures ...
are working on projects such as "The Distributed Management Task Force" (DMTF) with a goal of learning to "more effectively manage mixed Linux, Windows and cloud environments."
With the ''DMTF'' a decade old, the list of companies is growing, and also includes companies much smaller than IBM, Microsoft, et al.
Focus
Among the topics currently being explored are: scalability
Scalability is the property of a system to handle a growing amount of work by adding resources to the system.
In an economic context, a scalable business model implies that a company can increase sales given increased resources. For example, a ...
, securing data center networks, disaster recovery, government restrictions.
Another major area is the cost of downtime regarding customer dissatisfaction & business loss, and also the "astonishing" yet hidden cost and effect regarding personnel & productivity.
Business-service management
Business-service management (BSM) treats IT as part of the larger enterprise strategy, and helps fill the gap between business and IT.
IBM notes that major problems often happen in the grey areas, particularly due to errors in the interfaces, and focuses on critical failures. Sufficient redundancy should allow failures in non-critical areas to protect the business from being affected.[ BSM, which is positioned above ]IT Service Management
Information technology service management (ITSM) is the activities that are performed by an organization to design, build, deliver, operate and control information technology (IT) services offered to customers.
Differing from more technology-or ...
(ITSM), promotes a customer-centric and business-focused approach to service management
Service management in the manufacturing context, is integrated into supply chain management as the intersection between the actual sales and the customer point of view. The aim of high-performance service management is to optimize the servic ...
, aligning business objectives with IT or ICT from strategy through to operations. Tools that help BSM include a modeling language, and a common dashboard, which together allow data center personnel to see problems before business customers do.
Newer developments
Remote data center management allows offsite experts to watch for situations needing their timely intervention at a lower cost than having such staff be onsite 24/7/365.
While some requirements for on-site hardware have been reduced, spending in other hardware areas such as UPS may have to increase.
Data center asset management
Data center asset management (also referred to as ''inventory management'') is the set of business practices that join financial, contractual and inventory functions to support life cycle management
Life is a quality that distinguishes matter that has biological processes, such as signaling and self-sustaining processes, from that which does not, and is defined by the capacity for growth, reaction to stimuli, metabolism, energy tran ...
and strategic decision making for the IT environment. Assets include all elements of software
Software is a set of computer programs and associated software documentation, documentation and data (computing), data. This is in contrast to Computer hardware, hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work.
...
and hardware that are found in the business environment.
IT asset management generally uses automation to manage the discovery of assets[ so inventory can be compared to license entitlements. Full business management of IT assets requires a repository of multiple types of information about the asset, as well as integration with other systems such as supply chain, ]help desk
A help desk is a department or person that provides assistance and information usually for electronic or computer problems. In the mid-1990s, research by Iain Middleton of Robert Gordon University studied the value of an organization's help desks ...
, procurement
Procurement is the method of discovering and agreeing to terms and purchasing goods, services, or other works from an external source, often with the use of a tendering or competitive bidding process. When a government agency buys goods or serv ...
and HR systems and ITSM.
;Hardware asset management
Hardware asset management entails the management of the physical components of computers and computer networks
A computer network is a set of computers sharing resources located on or provided by network nodes. The computers use common communication protocols over digital interconnections to communicate with each other. These interconnections are m ...
, from acquisition through disposal. Common business practices include request and approval process, procurement
Procurement is the method of discovering and agreeing to terms and purchasing goods, services, or other works from an external source, often with the use of a tendering or competitive bidding process. When a government agency buys goods or serv ...
management, life cycle
Life cycle, life-cycle, or lifecycle may refer to:
Science and academia
*Biological life cycle, the sequence of life stages that an organism undergoes from birth to reproduction ending with the production of the offspring
* Life-cycle hypothesis ...
management, redeployment and disposal management. A key component is capturing the financial information about the hardware life cycle which aids the organization in making business decisions based on meaningful and measurable financial objectives.
; Software asset management
Software Asset Management is a similar process, focusing on software assets, including licenses. Standards for this aspect of data center management are part of ISO/IEC 19770.
Data center infrastructure management
Data center-infrastructure management (DCIM) is the integration of information technology (IT) and facility management disciplines to centralize monitoring, management and intelligent capacity planning
Capacity planning is the process of determining the production capacity needed by an organization to meet changing demands for its products.
In the context of capacity planning, design capacity is the maximum amount of work that an organization ...
of a data center's critical systems. Achieved through the implementation of specialized software, hardware and sensors, DCIM enables common, real-time monitoring and management platform for all interdependent systems across IT and facility infrastructures.
DCIM products can help data center managers identify and eliminate sources of risk
In simple terms, risk is the possibility of something bad happening. Risk involves uncertainty about the effects/implications of an activity with respect to something that humans value (such as health, well-being, wealth, property or the environm ...
and improve availability of critical IT systems. They can also be used to identify interdependencies between facility and IT infrastructures to alert the facility manager to gaps in system redundancy, and provide dynamic, holistic benchmarks on power consumption and efficiency to measure the effectiveness of "green IT" initiatives.
Important data center metrics include those regarding energy efficiency and use of servers, storage, and staff. In too many cases, disk capacity is vastly underused and servers run at 20% use or less. More effective automation tools can also improve the number of servers or virtual machines that a single admin can handle.
DCIM providers are increasingly linking with computational fluid dynamics
Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is a branch of fluid mechanics that uses numerical analysis and data structures to analyze and solve problems that involve fluid flows. Computers are used to perform the calculations required to simulate ...
providers to predict complex airflow patterns in the data center. The CFD component is necessary to quantify the impact of planned future changes on cooling resilience, capacity and efficiency.
Operations
Information technology operations, or IT operations (ITOps), are the set of all processes and services that are both provisioned by an IT staff to their internal or external clients and used by themselves, to run themselves as a business. The term refers to the application of operations management to a business's technology needs.
Operations work can include responding to tickets
Ticket or tickets may refer to:
Slips of paper
* Lottery ticket
* Parking ticket, a ticket confirming that the parking fee was paid (and the time of the parking start)
* Toll ticket, a slip of paper used to indicate where vehicles entered a tol ...
generated for maintenance work or customer issues. Some operations teams rely on on-call responses to incidents during off-hours periods.
As '' lights out'' operations increased, less of the staff are located near corporate headquarters. Gartner
Gartner, Inc is a technological research and consulting firm based in Stamford, Connecticut that conducts research on technology and shares this research both through private consulting as well as executive programs and conferences. Its client ...
defines IT operations as "the people and management processes associated with IT service management to deliver the right set of services at the right quality and at competitive costs for customers."
Technical support
Technical support
Technical support (abbreviated as tech support) is a call centre type customer service provided by companies to advise and assist registered users with issues concerning their technical products. Traditionally done on the phone, technical suppor ...
(often shortened to tech support) refers to services
Service may refer to:
Activities
* Administrative service, a required part of the workload of university faculty
* Civil service, the body of employees of a government
* Community service, volunteer service for the benefit of a community or a p ...
. Within a corporation, these are also known as help desk
A help desk is a department or person that provides assistance and information usually for electronic or computer problems. In the mid-1990s, research by Iain Middleton of Robert Gordon University studied the value of an organization's help desks ...
s often arrange their technical support structure as a three-tier (plus two) system:
* Tier 1: Basic help desk – initial point of contact
A point of contact (POC) or single point of contact (SPOC) is a person or a department serving as the coordinator or focal point of information concerning an activity or program. A POC is used in many cases where information is time-sensitive and ...
, including software opening a '' trouble ticket''. Information available to its personnel include FAQ and a basic knowledge base
A knowledge base (KB) is a technology used to store complex structured and unstructured information used by a computer system. The initial use of the term was in connection with expert systems, which were the first knowledge-based systems. ...
.
* Tier 2: In-depth technical support
* Tier 3: Expert product and service support.
The extra tiers are:[
* Tier 0: Self help (i.e. by the end user)
* Tier 4: Outside support for "items not directly serviced by the organization"
Access to varying levels of support for products and services to in-house employees and corporate customers, providing information
and ]troubleshoot
Troubleshooting is a form of problem solving, often applied to repair failed products or processes on a machine or a system. It is a logical, systematic search for the source of a problem in order to solve it, and make the product or process ope ...
ing is via various channels such as toll-free numbers, websites, instant messaging, or email.
Help desk professionalism
An ITIL
The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a set of detailed practices for IT activities such as IT service management (ITSM) and IT asset management (ITAM) that focus on aligning IT services with the needs of business.
ITIL d ...
-compliant help desk is usually a part of a bigger Service desk
Information technology service management (ITSM) is the activities that are performed by an organization to design, build, deliver, operate and control information technology (IT) services offered to customers.
Differing from more technology-or ...
unit, which is part of ITSM
As the incoming phone calls are random in nature, help desk agent schedules are often maintained using an Erlang C calculation. Companies with custom application software
Application may refer to:
Mathematics and computing
* Application software, computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks
** Application layer, an abstraction layer that specifies protocols and interface methods used in a ...
may also have an applications team who are responsible for the development of in-house software. The help desk may assign to the applications team such problems as finding software bugs. Requests for new features or information about the capabilities of in-house software that come through the help desk are also assigned to applications groups.
The help desk staff and supporting IT staff may not all work from the same location. With remote access applications, technicians are able to solve many help desk issues from another work location or their home office. While there is still a need for on-site support to effectively collaborate on some issues, remote support provides greater flexibility.
Some companies and organizations provide discussion boards
An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and are at least temporar ...
for users of their products to interact; such forums allow companies to reduce their support costs without losing the benefit of customer feedback.
Some fee-based service companies charge for premium technical support services.
Outsourcing technical support
Many organizations relocated their technical support departments or call centers to countries or regions with lower costs. Dell was amongst the first companies to outsource their technical support and customer service departments to India in 2001, but then reshored. There has also been a growth in companies specializing in providing technical support to other organizations. These are often referred to as MSPs (Managed Service Providers).
For businesses needing to provide technical support, outsourcing allows them to maintain a high availability of service. Such need may result from peaks in call volumes during the day, periods of high activity due to introduction of new products or maintenance service packs, or the requirement to provide customers with a high level of service at a low cost to the business. It allows businesses to use specialized personnel whose technical knowledge base
A knowledge base (KB) is a technology used to store complex structured and unstructured information used by a computer system. The initial use of the term was in connection with expert systems, which were the first knowledge-based systems. ...
and experience may exceed the scope of the business, thus providing a higher level of technical support to their employees.
Scams
A common scam typically involves a cold caller claiming to be from a technical support department of a company like Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...
. Such cold calls are often made from call centers based in India
India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...
to users in English-speaking countries
The following is a list of English-speaking population by country, including information on both native speakers and second-language speakers.
List
* The European Union is a supranational union composed of 27 member states. The total En ...
, although increasingly these scams operate within the same country. The scammer will instruct the user to download a remote desktop
In computing, the term remote desktop refers to a software- or operating system feature that allows a personal computer's desktop environment to be run remotely off of one system (usually a PC, but the concept applies equally to a server or a ...
program and once connected, use social engineering techniques that typically involve Windows
Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ser ...
components to persuade the victim that they need to pay for the computer to be fixed and then proceeds to steal money from the victim's credit card.
Preventive maintenance
Preventive maintenance (or preventative maintenance (PM)) is ongoing scheduled inspection intended to detect and correct incipient failures either before they occur or before they develop into major problems such as downtime.
Managing the capacity of a data center
With the increasing use of "the cloud" and what has been called "the Era of Infinite Capacity", there is still a need for professional Data Center Capacity Planners.
There is a need to know what will be needed, and when. Data must continually be collected regarding usage of power/energy, computing power, data storage and networking/telecommunications. Plans must include awareness of cooling and space requirements.
Sometimes analysis of this data, and comparison to industry norms, can be outsourced.[ The balance for the need to focus more on data collection or analysis depends on current use levels: prior to 50%, the focus can stay more on data collection. Beyond 75%, the focus must shift to analysis, in preparation for upgrades, replacements and expansions. The data center is a resource in its own right.
]
Top data centers and service providers
According to Cloudscene's Leaderboard for Q1 2018, data center operators are ranked "based on both data center density (total operated data centers)", as well as "the number of listed service providers in the facility". Cloud service providers are ranked based on "connectivity (the total number of PoPs) for the region." Chosen from a pool of more than 6,000 providers, the rankings are as follows:
; Q1, 2018 Top Data Center Operators Worldwide
; Q1, 2018 Top Service Providers Worldwide
See also
References
{{reflist
Asset management
Cloud storage
Computer data storage
*
Data management
Workflow technology