Database up to date with minimal effort

Today’s data centers with an outlook towards coming future business are more receptive to technological enhancements and adoption at various levels. As a result more and more of their core data is getting married with the auto-collected data and catalog details, and they are getting a single, complete source of data for gaining visibility into—and control over—a data center. As regular audits are conducted using the automated discovery tool, data centers can instantly detect any changes to this baseline data, flag and investigate them, and keep the database up to date with minimal effort. This is what is taking them towards next generation level. It is important to note that this level of data accuracy and currency is simply impossible to maintain using the traditional “management by spreadsheet” approach, whereby members of stand alone departments, such as networking specialists, power specialists, and data center managers, all update different versions of a spreadsheet and attempt to reconcile them periodically.

The Importance of Iterative Data Loads when evaluating data center management solutions, it’s important to consider the ease with which you can load new data into the database. If the software you choose only allows you to load data once, you will likely be managing with outdated data right from day one. Next generation data center resources are in a constant state of rapid movement, and it can take some time to collect all of the relevant data. In fact, if it doesn’t support automated data collection, it can take over a year for a single large data center. Imagine the hundreds and even thousands of changes your data center will undergo during that time period—and how inaccurate your baseline data will be going forward. Experts close to the industry recommend allowing customers to load discovery data iteratively—even one cabinet at a time. This gives data center operators the freedom to perform data collection as your budget, schedule, and resources permit. As they perform automated audits on the assets already managed using the software, their IT teams can easily detect changes and ensure data is always up to date—even as data centers continuously add new data to the system.

Source: IT VAR News