SOLUTION BRIEF
BI Tools Lay Foundation for Efficient Data Centres The Global Market for Micro Data Centres will Rise
29.8%
between 2015 and 2020.
Data centres are becoming more diverse than ever, creating an operational climate where business intelligence tools are essential. An IT Business Edge report analysing a MarketsandMarkets study alongside other research explained that both hyperscale and micro data centres are rising, creating a situation in which extremes become the norm in the sector. This disparity creates new operational challenges that are making solutions like automation essential, and IT professionals must be prepared for this shift. These studies point toward a clear vision for a near future in which the data centre looks incredibly different than it has for a long time. This new operational climate for the data centre is making business intelligence extremely important.
The Implications of Disparate Data Centre Environments For a long time, data centres have been fairly predictable locations where human IT experts have interacted heavily with infrastructure and played a key role in monitoring and maintaining systems. This isn’t feasible in a hyperscale data centre, where the sheer number of systems involved in supporting operations is too great for human operators to keep up. The IT staff would have to be so huge that it would eat up the entirety of a company’s budget. When it comes to micro data centres, trying to get personnel out to the edge locations where they reside to manage and maintain systems would be such a huge time and cost burden that it simply isn’t worth it. Instead, organisations need to automate many of the core workloads and processes that take place within data centres. This does not, however, make humans irrelevant. Automation can seem like a threat to IT workers, but it instead creates an environment where human data centre technicians take on a new role – that of the governor. Business intelligence tools provide the insights needed to help engineers make the right choices.
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SOLUTION BRIEF BI Tools Lay Foundation for Efficient Data Centres (continued)
BI & the Changing Reality of Modern Data Centres Highly automated workflows, devices that can report on the disposition of IT assets in real time, software that can automatically adjust environmental conditions or provision virtual machines in response to sensor data and similar tools all allow for data centre automation. Business intelligence tools can gather this disparate information and formulate it into reports that give IT workers vital insights into how their data centres operates.
With BI data at their fingertips, IT professionals can: • Forecast resource demand relative to hardware availability to stay ahead of scale-related challenges. • Identify root problems causing environmental issues, and change the configuration or schedule maintenance accordingly. • Evaluate data centre usage metrics alongside business data to identify how technology is creating business value and prioritise different workflows accordingly. • Monitor network assets, servers and storage systems for anomalous behavior to add an extra layer of intelligence to data protection strategies. Automated data centres give IT workers the time they need to deal with the big picture. BI tools provide the data needed to handle these issues in the most efficient way possible, creating an efficient operational climate.
Training for the Modern Data Centre Using BI to identify operational trends and optimise the data centre configuration requires a new set of skills. IT professionals can stay ahead of the automation curve and remain valuable by continuing their education, even if their current job is replaced by software.
Sources: http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/micro-datacentres-market-828.html#utm_source=whatech&utm_content=whatech.com/174529 http://www.itbusinessedge.com/blogs/infrastructure/the-big-and-small-picture-of-data-centre-automation.html
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