10 Tips to Extend the Life of Your Data Centre

Is your data centre bursting at the seams and are you struggling to meet demand?

Most freely available advice typically focuses on carrying out worthwhile exercises including virtualisation, storage consolidation and platform refreshing to more efficient hardware. For large firms, these projects can become huge programmes of work, spanning many months or even years and are often left until the last minute, making the data centre manager's job even tougher.

Unfortunately, for the data centre itself there are no magic wand solutions and major changes to the core infrastructure are often unrealistic on cost, disruption or both.

So what can a data centre manager do to defer hanging the "no vacancies" sign on the door? Here are 10 tips to extend the life of your data centre:

1. Audit, Audit, Audit - Make sure you know every last detail about your environment. Capture make and model details, power, connectivity and location for every asset deployed. Label and record everything, this detail is essential to help with...


2. Installation planning - Pay close attention to where you are deploying equipment and try to balance power, cooling and network capacity as much as possible. Maintaining installation standards should stop "dead space" from appearing in your cabinets because of patching like a mangrove swamp.


3. Money talks - Talking in kilowatts and BTU's wont cut it with the board, but telling them a £30k spend today will save £60k per annum probably will. Get energy consumption and unit costs to add something useful to your next conversation about PUE and remember, the FD is more likely to say yes to a sound business case.


4. Seize power and keep your cool - Understand PDU and breaker utilisation and try to balance where possible. Make sure you can recite generator and UPS autonomy on demand and make sure management understand them, too. Get to know your CRAC and Chiller operation and ensure they are tuned for efficiency, this will mean there might be some capacity in reserve when you need it most. Record cabinet temperatures, manually if needed, to produce a heat-map for the data centre and show efficiencies.


5. Know the pipeline - Get out and talk to your customers, ensure you are aware of projects being planned that will significantly impact capacity so you can start planning early. Host a regular meeting to review the pipeline and capture the data in a structured way


6. Information is key - You may have an all singing, all dancing DCIM tool or a handful of spreadsheets, just make sure to use the tools you have religiously to capture data and...


7. Keep people updated - Telling management one day they need £50m to build a new data centre because yours is nearly full is sure to get you fired, so issue a regular report that clearly shows current capacity and any constraints. Using your pipeline data to map known demand onto the current capacity and indicate the time-frame until capacity is reached will definitely not get you fired.


8. Capacity is a two-way street - Manage decommissions as closely as installs and review decommission plans as part of the approval process for new capacity. Using your now accurate asset list, produce reports showing old (inefficient) hardware that might make good candidates for virtualisation or refresh.


9. Keep current - Just because the paint is beginning to fade, don't write an ageing data centre off just yet. Keep abreast of current thinking and products to see if any give your facility a new lease of life. Improvements such as blanking, environmental monitoring or containment can make a huge difference and are often retrofit options.


10. Start early - By far the most important advice we give is this: "Manage at capacity while you are empty". In other words, start to implement controls, standards, audits and other measures as soon as you can. In years to come, you will be glad you did.

About the Author:

Craig Harffey is Operations Director for Myfreedom Data Centre Services, who specialise in data centre operations and provide managed services to medium and large organisations.

Whether you are looking to improve the performance of your current service, expand an existing operation or are starting from scratch, our services provide you with access to a dedicated team of data centre experts who are committed to achieving the best results for our customers.

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