How the evolution of data centres is shaping their monitoring needs

Digital transformation journeys were once considered a multi-year evolution, but now they have been dramatically compressed due to the urgency caused by the COVID pandemic. Demand for data centres in Asia Pacific has skyrocketed due to the widespread adoption of digital communication tools in the cloud and eCommerce. Our hunger for all aspects of data and the need for reliable data centres is growing exponentially.

The last two or more years have shown us that data centres have become the essential infrastructure many businesses now depend on. With organisations continuing to work remotely and many migrating to the cloud, data centre companies and managed service providers (MSPs) have had to respond to the increased demand and adapt how they deliver their services, so their customers can stay agile and connected 24/7.

With the ongoing growth of public cloud solutions, organisations in this region are reimagining their data centre requirements and are breaking out of the traditional four walls. Gartner predicts that by 2025, 40 percent of newly procured premises-based computing and storage will be consumed as a service via MSPs and service providers, up from less than ten per cent in 2021.

According to Gartner’s recent report — How to Evolve Your Physical Data Centre to a Modern Operating Model, as enterprise infrastructure moves toward cloud-distributed application delivery, the data centre itself is being transformed. Infrastructure decision-makers must transition to a hybrid model mindset, that enables speed and scale, where the presence of an on-premise data centre is no longer the primary driver for IT infrastructure decisions.

Constant monitoring of data centres

Data centres are inherently highly operational and maintenance-focused. They require constant monitoring; to manage assets, equipment, maintenance, capacity and so on. Having remote monitoring in place will ensure that efficiencies can be measured and systems optimised on an ongoing basis, particularly as capacity demands change.

Remote monitoring and management of hybrid data centres will become essential to maintaining business as usual for many organisations. Deploying thousands of sensors across a hybrid data centre environment will help to understand the assets’ condition and monitor the systems’ temperature or degradation.

The growth of MSPs

We’ve seen an increase in smaller data centres being established in Asia Pacific by MSPs for their clients. This has driven the need to monitor these facilities in terms of whether the technical equipment is functioning at optimal levels and how any physical aspects could impact their performance, such as humidity, heat and vibration.

This is where our hosted monitoring system comes in, as this can ensure that all of the technical equipment, such as the racks of servers, as well as the cooling systems, are functioning as they should be with sensors deployed across an entire data centre environment that will send alerts if anything needs attention.

The data centre power quandary

Our hunger for all aspects of data and the need for data centres is growing daily. However, the region’s data centres are using more and more power as we build larger and larger facilities to satisfy the exploding demand.

The question is, will the extraordinary growth in data centres, with their ever-increasing power demands, soon outweigh the global capacity to supply their electricity? Or will more governments, like Singapore, put limits on the number of new data centres permitted due to the need to reduce carbon emissions?

This will be further fuelled as those in the world who aren’t yet connected, become connected. We use data centres every day for gaming, streaming, financial services and online shopping, all of which drive this need for new data streams, services and infrastructure.

The take-out

I think we can all agree that data centres are at the heart of every IT infrastructure and are mission-critical in every organisation. As time goes on, data centre complexity keeps increasing and should a data centre fail, businesses are often left inoperable.

Monitoring a hybrid data centre environment is essential to avoid any downtime as it will proactively detect problems before they affect customers and help organisations provide a better quality experience to their clients.

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