Will Self-Healing Data Centers Achieve 100 Percent Uptime with DCIM?

Self-healing data centers are the Wolverine of the tech industry…

Have you ever wondered how all your data is available to you all the time? Have you ever seen the “Site is Temporarily Down Due to Whatever” message pop up in your browser and wanted to rage all over your desk? Well, you could do this:

 

Or you could wish for self-healing Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM). And that’s becoming more than just a possibility.

What’s the Reason for a Self-Healing DCIM?

Think about it. Data Centers host thousands upon thousands racks of servers, all wired up and just ripe for something to go wrong.

That’s why some companies provide backups and all sorts of crazy DCIM to ensure that your data is always safe and available at your request. But again, it isn’t perfect. Sure, data centers detect errors very well—but to whom do they send those error reports?

Human beings.

It’s up to them to diagnose the problem and fix it. And I don’t know about you, but I’m not certainly perfect and I don’t expect anyone to be—not even those IT people at the data centers. I mean, look at everything that needs to be managed and maintained.

And it’s poor Bob’s responsibility to try and fix all that, possibly needing to be in two places at once. In fact, human error is 65 percent of the reason for downtime. Yikes.

What’s Next for DCIM?

So, wouldn’t it be nice if there was a smarter, more self-aware system in place to help Bob? Something that could critically think and not have to rely on personnel? Yes, it would be nice, but it’s not that feasible.

That’s why newer, more progressive, DCIM tools are being put in place that can optimize Bob to his fullest capabilities. Progressions like:

-Predictive Alerts which alarm key personnel
-Knowledge of who is on duty and analyzes their capabilities
-Prognosis of equipment and facility health
-Preventative action, improvements, and procedure suggestions
-Increased situational awareness
-Correlate disparate data sources forming actionable conclusions
-Consolidate control and sensitive data to intranet to be securely accessed on-site only

That all seems like it should be pretty standard, right? Sure, but like everything, it needs to be perfected—and it’s currently far from that. I think we all take for granted how easy technology sometimes can be until that one little thing goes wrong that you never thought would go wrong and you scramble around on forums trying to find what is wrong and eventually give up and throw it off of your roof.

The main goal of DCIM is to never get to that point—neither for you nor for Bob working in the data center. DCIM is heading down the correct path, however, using human elements to drive intelligent action and provide that coveted, absolutely perfect 100 percent uptime.