White Paper
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Summary
The rst decade of the 21st century was one of rapid growth and change for data centers.
For most of the decade, data center managers were forced to react to rapid, continuous
changes dictated by the capacity and availability requirements of their organizations, and
the density of the equipment being deployed to meet those requirements.
Now, data centers must enter a new stage of maturity marked by a more proactive approach
to management to enable increased efciency, better planning and higher levels of service.
Achieving actionable visibility into data center operations requires the ability to collect,
consolidate and analyze data across the data center, using advanced devices, sensors and
management software.
The ten steps outlined in this paper provide a systematic approach to building the
foundation for data center infrastructure management by deploying and leveraging
measurement, intelligent controls and centralized monitoring and management. Data
centers employing these 10 prescribed point solutions for infrastructure performance
monitoring stand to gain an operational, strategic and transformative advantage for their
enterprise or business.
Through these 10 steps, data center managers can automatically collect data from
infrastructure systems and sensors placed strategically within the physical space and use this
data to gain higher availability, increase efciency, enhance the value of virtualization and
consolidation efforts and improve planning.
1. Sensing temperatures
2. Monitoring power
3. Monitoring rack conditions
4. Detecting uid leaks
5. Intelligent control of precision cooling
6. Intelligent control of critical power
7. Managing alerts and alarms
8. Monitoring energy efciency
9. Monitoring batteries
10. Monitoring and managing remotely