For any medium-large sized company, or indeed, any company experiencing quick and substantial growth, data centers offer the best means of collecting, and organizing data that can later be analyzed and used to generate business strategies.

More than this, though, data centers can offer a whole host of good practices to businesses, as business owners seek to find the best ways to store and analyze data in pursuit of informing future decisions.

The key to such analysis lies in real-time visibility and transparency across the data center. In other words, finding practices that allow for analysis of both big data with ease of access made an absolute priority.

What’s changed in the data center world?

Data centers are, much like the data they collect, an ever changing branch of any business.

As such, modern data centers bear little resemblance to their older counterparts, due in no small part to the sheer demands modern data centers must be built and optimized in order to deal with adequately, and efficiently.

These days, data center managers look for three primary things in their data centers:

1. The ability to clearly see and observe the state of facilities in real time
2. From these observations, the insight to make decisions based upon the optimization of the data center and IT infrastructure
3. A clear means of identifying, analyzing and ultimately, assessing the efficacy of the actions resulting from those decisions

In short, data centers should not just be used as storage devices anymore – they should function as a key means of influencing future business and management decisions.

How, then, do you transform the purposes behind an old-style data center into this new set of criteria? The answer is simple, but the implementation less so. In the simplest terms, modern data center managers require a DCIM (Data Center Infrastructure Management) Platform which will allow them to rapidly understand and assess information generated by the data center with the intent of using said information to generate business decisions.

The Benefits of Implementing a DCIM platform

• Energy efficiency: A DCIM platform consolidates data, meaning it can be accessed and understood in one fell swoop, reducing the need for coordination of multiple platforms, thus saving time and energy.
• Greater transparency: A platform that allows for real time inspection will also allow the data center manager to get immediate insight into the impact of any changes that said manager may decide to make, whether these be management, or infrastructure based.
• Time efficiency: The more a manager understands about the impact of change on their business, the more they’ll be able to make the right decision, and focus on other areas to drive growth.