One way to ensure that you are doing everything possible to protect your data center from disaster is by implementing smart data center infrastructure management (DCIM) software.

The data center is the heart of your IT operation, and it’s the most vulnerable component in your entire IT infrastructure. A data center outage can have a devastating effect on your business, so it’s important to protect your investment and make sure you have a proper backup plan in place.

What is DCIM?

DCIM is one of many types of software designed for managing physical aspects of an organization’s IT infrastructure.

Data Center Infrastructure Monitoring is used to monitor and control many aspects of the physical environment within a facility or building where IT equipment is housed, including power consumption, temperature levels, humidity levels, airflow, and more.

DCIM also gives you insight into how these key factors relate to each other — for example, how much power is being used by each device or what temperatures are optimal for cooling different types of hardware.

The most important aspect of data center infrastructure management is to establish an IT infrastructure that is scalable and flexible. By adopting a cloud computing model for your data center, you can easily add or remove resources on demand.

The cloud model offers a number of benefits including:

  • Flexibility — You can easily add or remove resources as you need them. This means that if you have a sudden surge in demand for server capacity, you don’t have to invest in hardware that sits idle most of the time. Instead, you can simply rent more server capacity from the cloud provider when necessary and then scale back once it’s no longer needed.
  • Cost savings — Cloud providers charge based on usage, so there’s no need to purchase hardware upfront and keep it around until it’s obsolete. You only pay for what you use — this makes it much cheaper than buying physical servers and keeping them around until they’re obsolete (or become less efficient).
  • Reduced risk — Since cloud providers are responsible for maintaining their own hardware and software, they have better uptime than individual organizations who rely on their own systems for storage and processing power (cloud providers make sure their systems are up at all times).

Next, What About a Smart Data Center Sustainability? 

The IT industry is beginning to take a more proactive approach to manage the carbon footprint of data centers. Many companies have begun measuring and reporting their carbon emissions, and some are even taking steps to reduce them.

Data centers have long been a big contributor to the world’s carbon footprint. And as technology advances, so does the power required to keep our digital lives up and running.

The first step is to measure your carbon emissions. Using a tool such as the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator or Google’s Renewable Energy Cost Calculator can give you an idea of how much energy your facility uses and what percentage of that comes from fossil fuels.

Setting goals for reducing carbon emissions will be easier once you know how much energy you use and how much comes from fossil fuels. For example, if most of your energy comes from coal-fired power plants, you may want to focus on increasing your use of renewable energy sources such as wind power or solar cells.

If most of your energy comes from natural gas or nuclear sources, then switching over to cleaner burning fuels like biofuels may make sense.

Here is a sample of several pieces of equipments to calculate the PUE value in the design stage, to reduce data center CO2 emissions:

Power Category
Data Center Subsystem IT Load Facility
A IT Load
1 Servers
2 Storage Equipment
3 Neworking
B Elevtrical Load
1 IT equipment in network operations center (NOC)
2 MV switchgear
3 Transformer 20 kV
4 Switchgear & panel boards
5 Uninterruptible power supplies (UPS
6 Uninterruptible power supplies (UPS

Green data centers are evolving concepts, but they can be defined as commitments to reducing the carbon emissions of the data center. 

Saving the Environment

Reducing emissions is one of the most important factors in reducing carbon emissions. 

The following are some of the ways to reduce emissions

Use a more efficient server. Use efficient, low-power equipment in your data center. This includes using high-density servers and storage, which use less power per unit of performance than traditional equipment. The Uptime Institute has found that newer designs can cut energy use by as much as 50%.

Reduce hot aisle/cold aisle temperature differentials. The Uptime Institute has also found that large temperature differentials between hot and cold aisles reduce power consumption by up to 15%. This reduction occurs because it takes more energy for the equipment to heat or cool air than it does for the air itself to flow through the racks and servers.

Increase airflow across racks and servers. Another way to save energy is by increasing airflow across racks and servers, which reduces both heating and cooling needs for the data center.

Active chilled beams and other forms of direct cooling on your racks or servers will also be cooled more effectively by increasing airflow — saving even more on power consumption down the road!

Another way that companies can improve efficiency is by purchasing newer equipment that uses less energy than older equipment models do. 

Conclusion

Smart data centers are the future of green data center sustainability. The smart data center reduces power usage and uses renewable energy sources, but it also takes into account the social and environmental impact of its operations.

If you’re looking for a way to make your data center more sustainable, the first step is to know how much carbon you’re emitting.

By designing and implementing the move to green data center operations, a business can greatly reduce the carbon footprint of their operation, improve the efficiency and utilization of their existing data centers, and have a more stable infrastructure overall.

IT managers plan how data centers are managed successfully. Green IT techniques and technologies should be used to reduce the risk of infrastructure failure.

Through facility awareness and self-learning technologies, smart data center infrastructure management can be achieved.

Facilities, systems, and data in a data center form a unique ecosystem.  A smart system could monitor this ecosystem, track events, calculate a risk index for failure scenarios, recognize variances from the norm, and inform IT, managers, about situations requiring corrective action.

Smart data center infrastructure management is initially complex or challenging, but with the right approach, the benefits realized will be clear. And we can make the environment much better, to zero emission.

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