With so many responsibilities being faced by data center management today, consistent facility cleanings can easily go overlooked. Here's why regular maintenance is a good investment for your organization and a must for any data center.
With a global scale of 138.9 billion USD in 2020, the data industry has become one of the most prolific markets in the digital era today. Data has become such a precious resource because of the benefit it brings to successful business decision-making. Still, for it to have any value, it must manage it effectively. Doing so is no small task, as data center managers have their hands full with the number of responsibilities it takes to ensure the successful maintenance of the facilities which store the 21st century's most valuable commodity.
To appreciate just how vital data center management is, we'll take a look at all it entails, as well as one critical element that often goes overlooked: regular data center cleaning. As we'll see, a data center manager's job is a critical one, and although they face many technical duties, neglecting this aspect of facility management is a financial risk they cannot afford to take.
As with any commodity, data must be stored, maintained, and protected to uphold its value. That process looks different for a digital resource like data, so preserving the worth of these 1s and 0s takes a particular skill set.
Enter data center management. Charged with the task of maintaining the integrity of all stored and incoming data, these digital stewards face a number of IT and technical challenges, including:
A job description as challenging as a Data Center Manager requires a combination of technical and administrative expertise. When the cost of downtime and facility maintenance, coupled with that responsibility, data center management's importance that leaves no detail overlooked quickly becomes evident.
Unfortunately, one aspect of DCM that is often neglected amidst all the security protocol and OS upgrades is thorough data center cleaning. It may sound trivial at first, but failure to implement a maintenance regimen that adheres to all data center cleaning standards can be very costly. It can have a severe impact on an organization's bottom line.
Today's servers are made from electrical circuits built on the micro — and sometimes nanoscale, making them more efficient and fragile than ever. The smallest dust particle or contaminant could potentially short-circuit entire servers, resulting in expensive downtime and perhaps resulting in the loss of massive amounts of data. Because of that, DCM's must carefully clean these data centers following the strictest guidelines, and much investment goes into ensuring their optimal performance. Here are a few statistics to explain just how much is riding on the maintenance of these facilities and how much it costs when something goes wrong.
The high Data Center Cleaning standards that must be met show that this type of maintenance requires a technical skill that matches the servers they protect. We've compiled a list of cleaning procedures that should be practiced in any data center. Still, the takeaway from the above numbers is twofold: First, that a data center outage is a severe financial burden to be avoided at all costs, and second, that consistent data center cleaning to prevent those outages is an investment worth making.