4 emerging challenges in data center management today

For corporate IT leaders in charge of managing data centers, simplicity is generally a top priority. The goal is to take all the company’s data and warehouse it in one neat, tidy place that’s easy to organize and oversee.

Unfortunately, though, in today’s era of rapid data center transformation, simplicity isn’t always possible. The game is changing – and quickly. More companies every day are realizing that they can’t simply store all their data in one tidy little data center. They need strategies that are more dynamic than that, and that offer them more visibility into the many different aspects of modern data management.

According to CIO, this is one of the major trends to watch in the data center landscape in 2019. Business leaders are as reliant on their data centers now as they’ve ever been, but they need to begin changing their strategies for how they use and manage those facilities.

“While the traditional data center network operations center remains important, the overall management structure is changing to allow end-to-end views of data center operations as well as cloud-based services in both public and private clouds,” HP’s David Chernicoff explained. “Data center operators must be able to integrate operations into that view.”

As data centers undergo rapid changes these days, managers have a wide range of challenges they need to be mindful of. Here’s a rundown of four major ones:

1. Accommodating rapid growth: Data Center Dynamics noted that as new computing paradigms like edge computing become more prominent, a lot of companies are having trouble scaling up their data centers fast enough to fit everything they need to fit. Traditional data center deployment methods can’t keep up; new strategies are essential.
2. Adjusting to increased density: For companies that don’t have the ideal amount of space to fit all their data, the challenge is to do more with less. This means they’re forced to pack their facilities with data more densely than they’re used to, which raises a whole host of other issues. Heating, cooling, electricity, equipment use, and floor space all need to be top of mind.
3. Handling new workloads: Today’s employees are tackling all sorts of new initiatives that were never possible in a previous era – including big data analytics, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things and more. These are all exciting new developments, but they all place new demands on data centers. How will companies organize all the data involved with these projects?
4. Integrating new hardware: To accommodate all the above new initiatives, it’s not just more storage space that’s needed – it’s more hardware as well. Different types of storage devices, processors, and integrated circuits are now frequently pieces of the puzzle, which means managers have to be adaptable in their approach to data centers.
   If you’re in charge of your company’s data center, you’ve got a lot of competing goals to juggle, and it helps to have a team of tech experts by your side who can help you identify your top priorities and execute a plan. We at Zones believe that we can be that team.

We offer a multitude of services that make managing your data center as simple as possible. Under the umbrella of Compute & Virtualization, we include services that can make your applications more reliable and reduce your overall spending. Under Storage & Data Protection, we have Storage Design & Implementation offerings that can change the way you approach your storage architecture. Data Center Transformation is the name of the game nowadays, and we want to help you win it.

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