By their very design, data centres are highly complex facilities. This makes managing them a big challenge for DC managers as they have to at the same time ensure a very high level of uptime, minimise risk, enable quick expansion, and deliver services and applications swiftly and at minimal costs.

Typical DC management tasks include: maintaining and upgrading hardware and software, managing storage, distributing and backing up data, processes, providing technical support, managing multiple vendors, and planning for emergencies. Performing such tasks for a single DC in a timely and efficient manner can impose a formidable burden in the aspects of time, skills, and manpower.

Throw in multiple facilities, different asset maturity levels, and diverse equipment, processes, and procedures, and different requirements for application availability, data retention, speed of recovery, and network availability, and the demands for the three aspects – and the costs associated with them – rise significantly. Having DC assets in more than one location, colocation facilities and edge DCs makes the undertaking even more onerous, especially if some assets are sited in other countries or continents.

While some DC management tasks must be directly performed, many can be automated, thereby eliminating unnecessary manual tasks, reducing the size of on-site teams, and lowering associated costs. Remote management of DC assets and entire facilities is not new though, having been used by organisations that moved to colocation or implemented edge computing. Its use was put in the spotlight – and its adoption accelerated – by the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdowns that it necessitated.

Remote Management Essentials
In order to attain total visibility into global DC footprints from anywhere at any time, DC managers need software and hardware tools that engender remote management of DCs. These include:
• Intelligent Switched Rack PDUs
Smart rack PDUs can securely monitor and control device power through a network connection and combine remote configuration and management with power distribution and power/environmental monitoring. Using grouping technology, power information can be made available per device, groups of devices, individual PDU, or rack.
• Environmental sensors
These support remote work and remote management applications while monitoring the environment within a DC. Used together with intelligent PDUs, they can ensure uptime by monitoring racks for potential hot spots, prevent overcooling, provide environment alerts, etc.
• KVM-over-IP switches
Leveraging Ethernet and TCP/IP networks to provide anytime/anywhere remote access, control, and management of hardware when data networks are down, these can be configured to ensure access to your critical devices and to re-boot devices with one push of a button.
• Serial Console Servers
The out-of-band access to critical network infrastructure enabled by such servers provide DC managers with control over servers, networking devices, security appliances, rack PDUs, virtual hosts, and wireless/telecom equipment anytime, anywhere.
• DCIM software
DCIM software bridges data spread across the IT, operations and facilities domains and provides actionable information for: managing physical, virtual and logical DC assets; planning and provisioning new equipment and capacity; making changes accurately; improving facility design; and increasing operational efficiency and asset utilisation.

How One Global Company Achieved It
A global shipping company headquartered in Hong Kong provides an excellent example of how enterprises can benefit from remote management of their DCs. It had 300 racks distributed over three DCs – two were collocated – in separate locations. The DC assets were sourced from various vendors and were cobbled together by different system integrators over years. Different access control protocols, multiple management dashboards and paper-based processes were in use, and staff had to be present when contractors performed maintenance work onsite.

Wanting to bring more order to the DCs and to the way they were operated and managed, the shipping giant started by stardardising its racks while retaining existing rack assets. Also on its wish-list were unmanned management of daily operations through an intelligent network, the ability to conduct remote health checks of each rack, improved rack power distribution, environmental monitoring of racks, enhanced and auditable access control for DCs and racks, and single-platform data logging.

To achieve these functionalities, the global shipper turned to Raritan solutions, including intelligent PDUs, Smart Rack Controllers, SmartSensors for temperature, humidity and rack doors, and SmartLock door access and control system. To make the fullest use of these solutions, as well as to be able to closely monitor and optimise power infrastructure in its DCs, the company also implemented Raritan’s Power IQ DC energy management and power monitoring software.

Using these, the company now has a real-time facility health map that provides a bird’s eye view of key data including active power, current and capacity, temperature, humidity, and rack events on an individual asset or whole cabinet basis. With such data at hand, it can remotely manage power and energy for particular or all PDUs, locate stranded power, trace the sources for threshold alerts, raise DC temperature without risk, calculate PUE Levels, and more.

In addition, paper-based reporting has been eliminated and reports are generated faster than before. And with rack doors now controlled and monitored remotely, the three DCs have transformed into unmanned data halls. Consequently, its IT team now has a slimmer duty roster and more time to focus on planning and other higher value-added duties.