Small and medium-sized organizations are joining Internet giants in the data center business. From healthcare clinics to manufacturing plants, financial companies to universities, local and regional organizations are taking their network to the edge. They’re operating small and medium-sized data centers ranging from network closets that house technology such as email servers, modular and containerized data centers that provide new capabilities at speed to market, to unattended edge sites that bring compute power to the last mile.
So, just how big are these fit-for-purpose data centers? Small data centers may house 50 to 300 racks, while medium-sized data centers may have 300 to 1,000 racks. Obviously, organizations with heavily digital operations will require more compute, power, and cooling equipment, so there is no one-size-fits-all size or plan for this market.
A Vertiv survey found that data center professionals expect their edge sites to grow 226% from 2019 to 2025. Since that survey was conducted before the pandemic, growth has become even more torrid. For example, hospitals have been buffeted by service demand, straining their day-to-day operations; manufacturing plants have introduced new video analytics-based digital health and safety tools; financial firms have struggled to keep pace with the demand for trading and other digital services; and universities are powering remote learning. Organizations are enhancing data center capabilities on an ongoing basis to meet these and other growing demands.
Implementing Monitoring Solutions to Protect Your Data Center Equipment
As a data center and facility manager, you’re buying more equipment than ever, including critical power, thermal management, and rack and enclosure solutions. In your race to meet business needs by setting up or expanding small and medium-sized data centers, you’re often sourcing equipment from multiple vendors, installing power and cooling to protect valuable compute equipment, and implementing lighting and security controls. But are you considering monitoring and management software?
Whether your team is working onsite or remotely, you need to be able to monitor the health of your data center equipment in real-time, identifying issues proactively that could harm equipment, and in turn, the performance of your business. You need a solution that your team can access anywhere, anytime to help manage and control data center operations across facilities and individual sites, down to the performance of a single piece of equipment.
Enter Vertiv™ Environet Alert™. This web-based, easily configurable solution is designed to provide you with increased visibility into your data center operations, helping you maximize uptime and performance. Vertiv Environet Alert provides you with sophisticated capabilities for your small and medium-sized data center at a price you can afford. Here’s how Vertiv Environet Alert can help accomplish critical business goals:
Work and collaborate anywhere: Log in securely from your location of choice to monitor your data center equipment, individually or as a team. Whether you’re adhering to stay-at-home orders or business protocols, working with a lean staff, or monitoring unattended edge sites, you gain a holistic view of all your operations and the ability to manage them from a single pane of glass.
Connect all your equipment: No matter what manufacturer you select or how much equipment you purchase, Vertiv Environet Alert can integrate and monitor it all. Avoid tedious manual work reviewing device health in person, collecting data, and preparing reports. Get real-time, automated reporting you can use to share updates on all aspects of performance, including power, cooling, environmental conditions, racks, assets, and more.
Understand your space and power capacity: Drill down to determine where space is available for new equipment or where devices reside. Use the information to plan installations or defend arguments for new facility investments.
Manage your growing data center operations: Vertiv Environet Alert makes it easy to create new sites, add devices, build views, and design dashboards that meet your needs. From your network closets and micro- or containerized data centers, to your standalone facilities, you can review performance within a single interface.
Get real-time information: Click on Vertiv Environet Alert interactive views to get alert summaries or visualize device, room, and site statuses in one glance. Streamline decision-making while removing the possibility of human error due to insufficient or misinterpreted data.
Get instant alerts: Fast action is key to addressing issues. Get alerts when the equipment exceeds predefined thresholds, so that you can prevent performance issues and outages. Set automated paths for unacknowledged alerts to ensure they are resolved on a timely basis.
Improve operations: Use analytics to identify how much energy is being used, so that you can identify areas to optimize, reducing costs over time. Identify hotspots that should be addressed swiftly to avoid equipment harm or degradation.
Generate reports quickly: Use Vertiv Environet Alert analytics to develop automated and custom reporting. Whether you need to report on uninterruptible power supply (UPS) status across sites or provide a top-to-bottom analysis of a site's performance, Vertiv Environet Alert makes it easy to generate reports, analyze trends and provide evidence of efficiency gains.
Meet critical service-level agreements: If you help run a data-driven, people-intensive business, you know that latency and outages are not an option. Visualize and report on data, identifying issues and trends. Proactively manage out equipment based on key criteria, such as age, lagging capabilities, or performance issues.
Train new staff easily: Vertiv Environet Alert’s intuitive graphic interface is easy to understand and train others on. New hires can use interactive views and cross-site navigation to monitor and manage all your data center operations.
Conclusion
If you’re installing new equipment or setting up a small- or medium-sized data center, don’t wait for an issue to develop before you gain monitoring capabilities. As a web-based solution, Vertiv Environet Alert can be instantly deployed and easily scaled, giving you confidence in your monitoring operations, scaling your staff’s time and talents, and meeting the demands of your digital business.
