When designing, managing, and optimizing data centers, the following best practices can be followed:
1. Plan for the future
Providing growth space is crucial when developing data centers. In order to save costs, data center designers may seek to limit facility capacity to meet the current needs of the enterprise, but in the long run, this may be a costly mistake. As demand changes, it is crucial to reserve space for new devices.
2. Optimizing energy utilization by measuring PUE
Something without measurement cannot be standardized, therefore, monitoring energy usage can explain the system efficiency of data centers. Electricity efficiency is a statistical data used to reduce non computational energy consumption, such as cooling and power transmission. To optimize usage, it is necessary to frequently measure PUE. Due to the significant impact of seasonal weather changes on PUE, it is particularly important to collect energy information throughout the year.
3. Invest in predictive maintenance
Inspection and preventive maintenance are usually carried out at regular intervals to prevent component and system failures. However, this technology ignores the actual operating conditions. The use of analysis and intelligent monitoring technology may change maintenance procedures. A powerful analysis platform with machine learning capabilities can predict maintenance needs.
4. Regularly review and clean the dataset
Even though the price of computer memory continues to decline, global archiving still costs billions of dollars annually. By deleting and retaining data, the IT infrastructure of data centers is relieved of its burden, thereby reducing regulation costs and energy consumption, and allocating computing resources and storage more effectively.
5. Improve uptime by establishing redundancy
For data centers, creating backup paths for network devices and communication channels in the event of a failure is a huge challenge. These redundancies provide a backup system that allows personnel to maintain and perform system upgrades without affecting service, or switch to the backup system in the event of a primary system failure. The layer systems within the data center, numbered from 1 to 4, define the normal operating time that customers may expect (4 being the highest).