Sunday, 10 February 2019 Blog ehdf

Best Practice for Data Centre Managers to Managing Outdated Equipment

Any industrial plant, that runs for years, lowers the efficiency. Data Centers are the IT industry’s power house which is expected to run most efficiently. Colocation Data Centers with options of Data Center Cages and Racks support an organization’s mission critical infrastructure or a Service Provider’s IT operations, that further supports day to day business in a 24/7/365 fashion. IT managers do their best to keep IT infrastructure updated in terms of software patches and updates. In a similar manner they also bring in upgrades of their hardware equipment.

But similar to industrial equipment, large scale, sprawling deployments of any IT working systems face obsolescence of all manners and need to be replaced. Replacing the hardware systems in a Colocation Data Center, whether compute, storage, networking, power and cooling, can be especially challenging for multiple reasons.

From an environmental protection point of view, hardware can be recycled through specialized agencies if it is made available through their established channels. It can also be reused for less critical and offline operations and therefore has a disposable asset value, however low in comparison to the purchase price.
More importantly, IT hardware needs to be sanitized to remove all traces of corporate and other data. It is not enough to delete and reformat the hard disks and so on. Large corporate and service providers run the risk of data theft and planned espionage if their IT assets are not disposed in an audited and sophisticated manner. Degaussing and destroying plays important role in Colocation Data Centers.
Research conducted by Coleman Parkes for Blancco in December 2018, across 600 Data Centers in Asia Pacific, Europe and North America, found that inefficient data sanitization is costing organizations hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. For others, more than half of their onsite IT assets are essentially dead weight, resulting in loss of efficiency, continuing support and maintenance costs, and non-compliance with potential security risks. Two in five organizations that store their data in-house are spending over $100,000 to manage obsolete IT hardware.

Industry experts point out these critical limits are being breached because there is insufficient knowledge and operational practices on how to manage hardware technology obsolescence. Very few vendors offer a continuous process of built in replacement of hardware, and usually the only way out is a forklift approach. It is only recently that many vendors have started to offer an evergreen approach of built in replacement of their SSD arrays and retain their customers globally.

Any hardware revamp program needs to follow these steps: identify the latest design standards; benchmark current and future performance expectations; conduct an internal gap analysis along these standards; and finally, prioritize all steps taken to modernize the Data Center. Same goes with facility devices and equipment to achieve expected, continuous, mission critical, efficient operation.