17 Dec 5 Common Data Center Problems
What are some common data center problems?
- Poor ventilation
- Inadequate space
- Inefficient storage system
- Outdated technology
- Downtime
Businesses with data centers are no stranger to the most common data center problems experienced on a weekly or even day-to-day basis. These issues can range from poor ventilation, insufficient storage space, downtimes, high power consumption, or even frequent downtime.
As much as possible, these issues should be avoided at all costs. Data centers should remain up and running even when office operations for the day have already ended. How else would all the data transmission, storage, and application use be possible without a well-organized data center?
As part of your business’ IT operations, your data center should be optimized for improved efficiency. You want to be able to rely on this network of systems, servers, and computers to allow your business to facilitate all IT-related operations continuously. Knowing the many issues that can take place is the key for you to address these problems. Continue reading to learn more.
Poor Ventilation
One of the main issues that businesses who house data centers struggle with is poor ventilation. Different varieties of equipment, devices, computers, etc., are stored inside the data center’s physical location. Since they’re expected to run all day without experiencing failure, they will inevitably generate a large amount of heat.
Keeping this in mind, when you notice that your data center is recording higher temperatures than the ideal range — 18°Celsius to 29°Celsius — then you have to implement some changes to improve the cooling/ventilation.
It may seem that investing in cooling equipment and other HVAC systems may be expensive in the short term, but it does have benefits in the long run.
For example, a well-cooled data center will handle heat levels and normalize the temperature of the entire location. This means that you’ll minimize or completely eliminate any instances of systems shutting down due to overheating hardware failure, or physical damages to computer parts.
Inadequate Space
Determining your data center’s size is one of the first things that you usually do when you’re planning to have this type of location for your office building. But oftentimes, due to poor planning, data centers sometimes have trouble with storing all equipment in it. This ultimately leads to a poor physical organization that prevents navigability and reduces the ergonomics of the room.
As such, it’s important that you conduct the right planning and design conceptualization for the data center. This ensures that the space is conducive enough to house equipment, server racks, computers, firewalls, power switches, cooling, and the like, while also leaving enough space to house other equipment.
Aside from the dimensions of your data center space, you also need to think long-term about your organization’s future. If you have any expansion plans, this certainly means that more work will have to scale your IT operations. Think about this in terms of the type of equipment you’ll put in the data center to provide ample support for your business.
Inefficient Storage System
Combined with inadequate physical space, an inefficient storage system can also affect your data center’s organization. In this case, you may need to use other methods that can help improve the data center’s appearance and functionality.
For example, examine the many servers that are housed in the center. See if there’s something you can do about your server storage mechanism. You might be using a system that’s not really effective at containing all the equipment.
Look into blade servers, rack servers, or tower servers and compare the pros and cons of each. Some are better suited for small businesses, while some are better for large organizations. Certain server frameworks can support better uptime even if one module fails, but it all depends on your data center’s current requirements.
Outdated Technology
If your business’ data center has already been existing for some time, it’s normal for most processes to slow down. Other factors can cause this, but you can find the culprit by figuring out how your business has grown and developed over the years.
You may need to consider new technologies and buy new equipment to increase the efficiency and speed of application-sharing, data transfer, email services, and other IT functions.
Look into how you can potentially scale up your bandwidth. Other than that, you could also look into small devices like switches, cables, server racks, chassis, or blackpanes. The more compact they are, the better.
Downtime
This is one of the major issues that you don’t want to happen to your data center. Not only does it shut down all of your systems, but it may also have far-reaching consequences on profitability for your organization.
The ideal situation is to avoid any downtime that can affect the work of your business’ departments. If you want to prevent downtimes, always conduct constant checks and assessments to ensure the data center is in perfect working order.
You should also bolster efforts on data center security to deter cybercriminals. Also, see to it that any operating systems are up-to-date to carry the load in the data center.
Key Takeaway
Some common data center problems that can happen to your facility can be either one or more of the following: downtime, outdated technology, inadequate physical space, poor ventilation, or an inefficient storage system.
The best-case scenario is that these issues are avoided altogether, but if this isn’t possible, you can make a number of modifications to your current structures. There’s definitely still room for improvement to optimize the many processes and systems in the data center.