Empowering the DataCenter Operator – ACE Performance Assessment

Introduction

At a high level, the data center is a trade-off between three intertwined variables: availability of IT, physical capacity and cooling efficiency (ACE).

In our previous papers, Five Reasons your Data Center’s Availability, Capacity and Efficiency are being Compromised, and From Compromised to Optimized: An ACE Performance Assessment Case Study, we established that mismanaging these variables causes costs to escalate. We also proposed a method, predictive modeling, of sustainably managing ACE in order to reach the goals of the business.

This focus on the operational flexibility and high-level goals of the business is all very nice for the most senior levels of an organization, but what does it mean for you, the operations team? After all, you’re the people who are the ‘boots on the ground’; the people tasked with the actual day-to-day running of the data center.

You will no doubt have first-hand experience of tools and methodologies that have been prescribed from above in the mistaken belief that they will improve efficiency, or prevent downtime, or help you manage capacity. In our experience, the majority of these actually make your job harder to do, so they eventually get left by the wayside.

Making Your Life Easier

So, how is our proposal any different? What we hope to show you in this paper is that predictively modeling using the 6SigmaDC suite’s Virtual Facility (VF) will not only fit into your day-to-day process seamlessly, but also make your job easier and your life less stressful.

How many times have you approved a change that fit within the design rules, only to receive a call telling you that IT service has been interrupted and that you have to fix it, right now? Probably enough for you to think that it is just part of the job; it’s something that comes with the territory, right? It does not have to be. It is simply a knock-on effect of the fact that instead of managing data center availability, capacity and efficiency as three interconnected variables, your organization is treating them as three separate silos. In fact, they probably haven’t been looked at together since the original design was created at the start of the facility’s life.

Given the fast pace of change within any organization, the chances are fairly small that the IT plans put together by the design consultant bear any resemblance to the equipment that is actually installed in your facility today – there is a colossal disparity between the design and the reality. Add to this IT disparity the various energy efficiency drives which will have changed the infrastructure from the original design, and you are left trying to fit square pegs into round holes.

Adding more environmental monitoring will have helped choose which holes to avoid and will have reduced the number of critical events, but firefighting is still a large part of your job. A large number of those fires could be avoided if only you were provided with the right information. This is precisely what predictive modeling does.

What we intend to show in this paper, through the use of examples based on
our decades’ worth of experience in the data center industry, is how predictive modeling is an essential tool in your fight against downtime. We will demonstrate how the data from a VF can provide you with crucial information that is simply not available using any other method. Finally, we will show you how our new ACE Data Center Performance Score provides a simple way to analyze, compare and communicate the effect different options have on a very complex system.

Download Here: http://www.futurefacilities.com/media/info.php?id=292