Data centers are designed and built to fulfill the key characteristics which are explained in below.
Characteristics of DataCenters:
- Data integrity: Data integrity refers to mechanisms, such as error correction codes or parity bits, which ensure that data is stored and retrieved exactly as it was received.
- Availability: Availability of information as and when required should be ensured. Unavailability of information can severely affect business operations, lead to substantial financial losses, and damage the reputation of an organization.
- Security: Policies and procedures should be established, and control measures should be implemented to prevent unauthorized access to and alteration of information.
- Scalability: Organizations may need to deploy additional resources such as compute systems, new applications, and databases to meet the growing requirements. Data center resources should scale to meet the changing requirements, without interrupting business operations.
- Capacity: Data center operations require adequate resources to efficiently store and process large and increasing amounts of data. When capacity requirements increase, additional capacity should be provided either without interrupting the availability or with minimal disruption. Capacity may be managed by adding new resources or by reallocating existing resources.
- Performance: Data center components should provide optimal performance based on the required service levels.
- Manageability: A data center should provide easy, flexible, and integrated management of all its components. Efficient manageability can be achieved through automation for reducing manual intervention in common, repeatable tasks.
Managing a Datacenter
Any Datacenter should be properly managed by the organisation to make the business running without disruptions. The activities carried out to ensure the efficient functioning of a data center can be broadly categorized under the following key management processes.
- Planning: It is a process of estimating the amount of IT resources required to support business operations and meet the changing resource requirements. Planning leverages the data collected during monitoring and enables improving the overall utilization and performance of resources. It also enables estimation of future resource requirements. Data center managers also determine the impact of incidents and devise contingency plans to resolve them.
- Provisioning: It is the process of configuring and allocating the resources that are required to carry out business operations. For example, servers are provisioned to run applications and storage capacity is provisioned to a server. Provisioning primarily includes resource management activities to meet capacity, availability, performance, and security requirements.
- Monitoring: It is a continuous process of gathering information on various resources in the data center. The process involves monitoring parameters such as configuration, availability, capacity, performance, and security of resources.
- Maintenance: It is a set of standard repeatable activities for operating the data center. It involves ensuring the proper functioning of resources and resolving incidents such as malfunctions, outages, and equipment loss. It also involves handling identified problems or issues within the data center and incorporating changes to prevent future problem occurrence.
- Reporting: It is a process of collating and presenting the monitored parameters such as resource performance, capacity, and utilization of resources. Reporting enables data center managers to analyze and improve the utilization of data center resources and identify problems. It also helps in establishing business justifications and chargeback of costs associated with data center operations.
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