7 Tips for Remote Data Center Management

As data centers become increasingly decentralized, managing them remotely is now a must-have skill. Data center professionals need to maintain uptime, increase efficiency, and boost productivity across all their global sites without leaving their desk.

While this might have once seemed near-impossible, with the right tools and processes, remotely managing your data center can be even better than physically being there. With modern Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software, you can have access to whole range of capabilities that simplify remote data center management.

What Is Driving Remote Data Center Management?

The key trends that are leading to increased remote data center management include:

• Distributed infrastructure. The increased adoption of edge computing and colocation services has led to the proliferation of data centers across the world. Organizations are placing their data centers closer to their customers to improve the customer experience. Managing these widely distributed data centers centrally with remote management tools is now essential.
• Cost savings. The efficacy of modern remote data center management tools have allowed organization to centralize their teams and reduce on-site staffing requirements in favor of remote hands services.
• Enhanced security. Centralized remote data center management allows organizations to implement robust security measures consistently across all sites. Having fewer people in the data centers also directly results in fewer physical security threats.
• Increased remote work. The shift to remote work has increased the demand for remote data center management.

7 Tips to Manage Your Data Center Remotely

Here are some tips to upgrade your remote data center management skills:

1. Implement robust monitoring tools

Data center monitoring lets you know what’s happening in any site no matter where you are.

DCIM software automatically collects, stores, trends, reports, and alerts on the live measured readings from your power meters and environmental sensors. This lets you eliminate visits to the data center and transforms your data into actionable insights that help you maintain uptime and increase efficiency.

For example, centrally monitoring your power distribution infrastructure including rack PDUs, RPPs, floor PDUs, branch circuits, busways, and UPS units lets you proactively respond to issues before they become larger problems and easily report on capacity and utilization.  

Environmental monitoring includes the observation of temperature, humidity, and other conditions in the data center to make sure equipment is functioning safely and efficiently. You can identify if you are overcooling equipment and wasting energy, staying within American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) guidelines that recommend ideal temperatures to operate in, forming hot spots, or operating in humidity that’s too low or high that can cause static electricity to build up or other adverse conditions.

By monitoring your power and environment remotely you can save money on operational costs, detect threats before they become problems, and make informed decisions based on real-time and trended data.

2. Embrace automation

Data center automation is rapidly becoming popular and it can be extremely beneficial for remote management. Daily tasks and operations that typically need manual effort can be automated via integration to increase productivity and increase the accuracy of data.

Integrating DCIM software with CMDB tools is one popular approach. A complete DCIM solution comes with an out-of-the-box CMDB connector that lets you integrate with common CMDBs such as ServiceNow, Jira, BMC, and Ivanti/Cherwell. Then, assets can be automatically created, updated, and deleted in either system assets to enable flow-through operations.

You can also integrate DCIM software with ticketing systems such as ServiceNow and Jira to gain automated workflow. Ticketing automation minimizes swivel chair management, eliminates work requests through random emails, and enables an organized worklist with real-time status updated automatically between systems.

Another popular integration is with VMware which lets you track which physical devices a VM is running on.

Then, there are automation capabilities within DCIM software such as thresholds and automatic alerts, automatic device power budgeting that can improve utilization by 40%, automatically scheduled charts and reports, and business rules.

Customers like Workday describe how they use DCIM software’s automation via integration abilities to make the “provisioning process zero-touch from the point at which a cabinet is installed, cabled, and powered.”

When you do not have physical access to equipment on-site, automating daily routine tasks is critical to maintain efficient operations.

3. Follow security best practices

Remote data center management requires adhering to proper security processes to ensure your data and infrastructure is not exposed to threats.

Deploy a DCIM solution that has reporting, audit logs, and surveillance feeds to monitor who accesses cabinets and how often. DCIM can also track if electronic door locks access attempts have been successful or not.

Plus, granular DCIM permissions with role-based access control ensures that your users only have access to the data that they need.

4. Conduct regular asset audits

When you have remote technicians installing and decommissioning equipment, routine asset audits are important to ensure that your asset inventory is accurate.

Traditionally, asset audits require a lot of manual effort and often get deprioritized. Yet, they provide useful details on existing equipment, let you know where you have space capacity to deploy more, and may be necessary compliance reporting.

Now, DCIM software allows for quicker and more accurate auditing that can be done by one person with a barcode/QR code scanner. Built-in logic anticipates the next step in your audit process and a voice response provides feedback on the assets and recommends any changes necessary if the scan does not match the database.

With accurate asset information, it’s much easier to remotely manage your data center.

5. Provide detailed work orders to remote hands

Remote hands perform physical tasks onsite while you manage the data center from afar, but they need clear instructions to be able perform work quickly and accurately. Otherwise, you increase the security risk the longer they are in the data center or may need to send them back to rework a job.

With a DCIM solution, you can provide visual work orders and detailed rack elevations. Work orders can be assigned and routed to the right team, and you can ensure work order quality with accurate and complete working instructions.

Then, you can remotely monitor, manage, and report on all the changes happening in your data centers. You can see who created tickets, work order details, the start date, current status of work orders, actions taken, and the complete date.

6. Foster collaboration and communication

Another tip to improving remote data center management is by fostering meaningful collaboration and communication across your team through shared data and common KPIs.

With second-generation DCIM software’s data center analytics, this has never been easier.

A comprehensive DCIM solution will provide over 100 preconfigured dashboard charts and reports so your teams can track the most important data center KPIs on day one. Standard dashboards include Enterprise Overview, Enterprise Health, What-If, Items Inventory, Parts Inventory, Space, Power, Cooling, Connectivity, Change, Tabular Reports, and DCOI. 

You can also customize dashboards, charts, and reports, automatically schedule weekly reports via email, and securely share dashboard chart widgets to your corporate portals.

Visual analytics such as correlated capacity reporting on your 3D floor map enable data-driven collaboration by making something as complex as capacity planning easily understandable by any team with red/yellow/green color-coding for each rack.

7. Leverage a digital twin of your data center

Ever wish you could have a virtual replica of your data center so you can remotely monitor it? Now you can. Implementing DCIM software lets you see a digital twin of your data center which is a virtual 3D replica of your facility that mirrors real-time conditions.

A digital twin data center provides remote visualization of:

• Assets including servers, networking, and storage infrastructure that are to scale down to te port level
• Physical connectivity such as structured, patch, and power distribution cabling
• Power data from rack PDUs, RPPs, floor PDUs, branch circuits, busways, and more that are collected and analyzed in real-time
• Environmental data that lets you know the temperature, humidity, pressure, and other conditions in your data center (e.g., thermal map time-lapse videos)

Bringing It All Together

As the data center industry evolves towards remote management, data center professionals need the proper tools and information to navigate its unique challenges.

Tackle the remote management challenge with DCIM software that gives makes remote data center management even better than being there.

Want to see how Sunbird’s second-generation DCIM software can help you improve your remote data center management? Get your free test drive now.