The debate of cloud vs data center looms large for businesses when determining how to best store data. In past years, the trend has leaned more toward the growth of remote solutions using the cloud. Yet, data centers are still relevant. Gartner states that spending on data center infrastructure is expected to grow 6% by the end of 2021. Cloud storage and data centers both possess unique features that allow you to achieve your organization’s data goals.

The recent heatwave that brought record temperatures to the UK caused cooling systems to fail at a London data center resulting in downtime for Google and Oracle. According to Oracle, “Following unseasonably high temperatures in the UK south (London) region, two cooler units in the data centre experienced a failure when they were required to operate above their design limits.

Naming conventions for assets have a rich, engaging, and often hilarious history. While recently organizations have switched to standardized and more informative naming conventions based on location and function, earlier (and even now) IT departments have had a lot of fun naming assets for their data centers and servers. IT departments have often showcased their inner geek by using names of Star Wars or Star Trek characters for their assets.

Today’s data centers generate a lot of data. Intelligent rack PDUs and other metered power infrastructure, environmental sensors, and the constant change in modern data centers all contribute towards a massive volume and variety of data. But data center professionals don’t have the time to collect all the data from its sources, analyze it, and derive insights from it that improve their data center operations.

We’re proud to announce the general availability of dcTrack® 8.2, the latest version of Sunbird’s DCIM Operations software. This release includes exciting new features including a ticket connector to drive automation via integration, automatic data network diagrams for remote visualization, and asset audit via barcode scanning.

Rack diagrams, also known as rack elevations, are visual representations of the IT equipment in a server rack. They are used to track and manage what assets are in each rack and which U position they are in. Rack diagrams are very useful and commonly used for data center asset management and capacity planning. The information rack diagrams provide allow you to know what equipment you have, where you have space to deploy more, and can improve the troubleshooting process.

Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) is the most commonly used metric for measuring data center energy efficiency. It was developed by The Green Grid in 2007 and has been widely popular ever since due to growing concerns of the sustainability of data centers and for being able to represent overall efficiency with one easy-to-understand number.

Even after the public cloud hype, private clouds remain to be a very essential part of many enterprises’ cloud strategy. Private clouds are simply giving CIOs more control over their budgets, enabling better security and allowing the flexibility to build best of breed IT solutions. So let’s stop here and take a step backwards, why are organisations even investing in their IT?