Preventing Data Centre Downtime

Sunbird’s Data Centre Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software allows data cente mangers to avoid unplanned downtime that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per outage and wreak havoc on your business. Some of the ways to prevent human error and maximize uptime with DCIM are:

• Manage inlet air temperature and humidity. The temperature and humidity of air at the inlet of cabinets is important because this is the air that flows through the cabinet to decrease the heat. If the inlet air is too warm, the cabinet will not cool properly. If the air is too humid, there is a risk of corrosion and damaged equipment. And if the air is too dry, there could be a static electrical discharge. All of which these can cause costly downtime. DCIM software collects data from environmental sensors in the data centre and displays the information in business intelligence dashboards and 3D floor map visualizations to help you monitor your data centre environment and identify hot spots.
• Safely increase temperature. Increasing temperatures in the data centre can improve energy efficiency, but it comes with the risk of overheating and damaging equipment, resulting in downtime. With DCIM, you can set temperature thresholds and receive alerts when temperatures are outside of your desired range. Similarly, DCIM will help you avoid overcooling to optimize efficiency and reduce energy costs.
• Ensure power redundancy. Due to the increasing demand of computing hardware, data center cabinets are now packed more densely with power-hungry IT equipment. And since data centre teams are often focused on fully utilizing existing resources and delaying capital expenses, they may not be aware that a cabinet is overloaded until it is too late. This makes power redundancy in the event of equipment failure a critical component of any strategy to maximize uptime. DCIM software allows you to run a failover simulation report and identify what cabinets are at risk and what equipment can continue functioning safely if a PDU goes down. Data centre managers can leverage this information to make necessary changes to the loads before there is a real failure.
• Health polling. Ensuring that intelligent PDUs and other devices are operating properly and accessible via your network is important to maintaining uptime. It is not impossible for equipment to go down without anyone noticing. A technician or engineer may place a PDU into maintenance mode accidentally, neglect to power on new resources, or connect equipment by the incorrect ports or cables. With DCIM software, you limit the possibility of outages caused by malfunctioning equipment by polling intelligent PDUs and other equipment at user-configurable intervals to ensure that they are accessible. If the device is not reachable, the software alerts you immediately, so you are aware of the issue before there is a crisis.