What a difference a year makes. Each year, data center, lab, and edge sites become more complex, more distributed, and more difficult to manage. Managers must stay up to date on the latest trends and advancements in data center management best practices and technologies to maintain uptime, increase the efficiency of capacity utilization, and improve the productivity of people.
Data center managers often struggle to accurately track and manage their data center parts inventory. Legacy management tools like Excel spreadsheets are commonly used, but they fail to support the complexity and distributed nature of modern data center environments. They are hard to use, difficult to maintain, time-consuming, and error-prone.
Modern data centers and labs are growing in density and complexity as IT devices require more and more power to racks. As such, many data center and lab managers deploy overhead busways for their reduced installation costs and better flexibility, scalability, reliability, and aesthetics. However, without a software solution to monitor and manage your busways, you likely aren’t getting the full value out of them.
We are proud to share that Sunbird was recognized by Datacenter Insider as silver award winner in the Datacenter Innovations category in their 2021 IT Awards. According to Datacenter Insider, this year's IT Awards received a record 64,000 reader votes. Datacenter Insider's readers were able to choose from one of the nominated companies available for selection as their favorite by online voting and were able to suggest other companies as well.
Data center automation is the process in which routine processes of data center operations are completed without any manual effort. It increases operational efficiency, improves data accuracy, and simplifies data center management. One of the leading organizations in driving automation via integration with Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software is Workday. Workday has been a Sunbird customer for over five years and currently has 900+ users on their system and growing.
Data center managers are tasked with increasing energy efficiency to improve data center sustainability and save money. One of the best practices to increase data center energy efficiency is to implement data center containment. Data center containment is a highly effective way of managing airflow, increasing efficiency, and reducing wasteful energy costs. It is the separation of cold supply air from cooling equipment from the hot exhaust air from IT equipment.
Automating data center tasks to increase operational efficiency is a primary goal for most data center professionals, but it can be a struggle. Professionals who have used legacy data center management tools like first-generation Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software, Excel, and Visio can attest to the fact that they are time-consuming, difficult to maintain, and inaccurate.
Data center managers are increasingly looking for ways to automate tasks to save time and improve data accuracy. In our recent Automation Workshop webinar, data center experts from eBay, MacStadium, and the University of Chicago shared their real-world use cases and insights on how they use APIs and integration to drive automation in their data centers.
Whether you are downsizing your infrastructure within a single room or eliminating half of your data center sites, a data center consolidation is a complex, risk-prone project. Fortunately, you can mitigate many of the mistakes and unwelcome surprises that even the most experienced data center professionals find derailing their project and instead enjoy the many advantages of a data center consolidation.
Today, it’s more important than ever to secure your critical infrastructure. You just have to look at some of the large cyberattacks that occurred this year to understand why. In 2020, 80.7% of organizations suffered at least one successful cyberattack, and 35.2% suffered six or more. You must follow best practices to avoid being one of these victims.
