Introduction
When we talk about human being health, we take care of ourselves regularly by seeing a doctor to run through some diagnostics and assessments from the doctor.
Data Center is the same. When it was first built, there will be some health checks power and cooling supplying on the data center health IT equipment.
Once the completion of diagnostics and assessments, there will be a report to let us know what is the current condition of our health is. And whether if there is a need to further refer to a specialist to further diagnose or assess our health condition, if the reports showed sign of defects or deteriorations.
When the conditions or health of the data center shows unfavourably results, the data center engineer will report to the operations team to understand the risk and implications. The data center engineer may recommend further diagnostic or assessment of the power and cooling critical infrastructure to ensure data center risks minimized data center to the lowest.
How Data Center Health Being Applied?
A good deal of software companies have created data center management software, which allowed Data Center Operators to understand the data center health on a high level basis.
There are also excel worksheet in the market able to help to facilitate high-level data center health information to understand overall data center health performance on power and cooling, but they are static information instead of real-time information.
Data Center Information Management (DCIM) software is ideal to monitor the entire chain reaction of the power and cooling systems in the data center and provide real time information.
Some of these DCIM software vendors, like Schneider Electric, Device42, and Nlyte are among the few companies that provided this type of DCIM software to monitor the power and cooling in real-time basis.
Is There Alternative Apart From DCIM Software?
There are many solutions to a problem. Cost is the deciding factor whether to put in place having the required tools to tasks to understand data center operation and performance efficiency of the Data Center Health.
Excel spreadsheets are some of the oldest, and traditional ways of keeping track on numbers and description of tasks on percentage of risk and completion of tasks.
In the data center environment, we normally use Excel spreadsheets to keep track engineering tolerance value, which helps the data center engineer to decide if there is a risk to execute and decide to increase the power on the server racks to reduce it.
Excel spreadsheet can give static information to decide the requirement on server racks loading but they can never do real-time server racks loading and simulation, when adding more or reducing the equipments from multiple server racks.
Therefore, DCIM software is still a core engine component to allow the triple action that the data center engineer can appreciate. First, there is static information given as an actual operation of power and cooling at the server racks by providing snapshots.
Secondly, the DCIM software can simulate the server racks future consumption. This is helpful when it come to projecting the cost for the utilities cost in the data center.
Thirdly, the DCIM software can forecast the projection of power and cooling required for the entire data center based on the current operation. Which helps Data Center Facility Operation manager to decide if there is a need to build a new data center.
Data Center Health 