Data Center Maintenance and Visibility

How does BTA help customers to make their data centers more resilient? It starts with designing for the level of resilience that the business requires. This includes performance, security, and serviceability. These are the keys to sustaining infrastructure. All of these require data and knowledge, as well as tying things into key performance metrics that map directly to business requirements. Regular upgrades (aka serviceability) are key to prevent outages related to known and unknown vulnerabilities and bugs. These can cause some sleepless nights that end up in a fire fighting exercise. Being afraid to perform infrastructure maintenance is not an option anymore.

Insights

Insights are key because you cannot manage what you do not monitor. The IT industry’s approach to uptime is quite different today than it was in the early 2000s. In the early 2000s, uptime was just as critical, but teams had to use a lot of hardware, e.g., N+1 or 1-1 redundancy. 

In the last five years, we have seen a steep increase in the number of vulnerabilities that threat actors can exploit. Threats are no longer limited to end users; they are going after the infrastructure. Hence, keeping infrastructure current by doing regular maintenance and upgrades, technology performance assessments and requirements reviews are critical to protecting the company’s reputation and revenue.  

Using AI tools is crucial, because it's hard to train entire teams to be all-knowing of the entire stack (Apps, Servers, Storage, Network, SLB, Firewalls, etc.) within the environment. The solution is to build a system where that data is visible end to end and uses AI to eliminate the “noise” out and focus on the things that matter. 

Upgrades

Companies are always looking for an edge in this climate of rising interest rates and increased labor costs; reducing CapEx and OpEx spend while trying to maintain a competitive advantage in the market. Performing fundamental maintenance ensures that all of the advanced capabilities and applications that leverage the infrastructure will perform optimally while being secure and available. Ultimately, it’s about delivering a better end user experience for the applications being hosted on your infrastructure.

We typically recommend that customers upgrade their infrastructure software at least every six months. There are many tools available that can help to accomplish this, and platforms have improved the process of software upgrades. For example, cloud infrastructures typically upgrade automatically with minimal or no customer intervention. Painless upgrades are also achievable with physical infrastructure, knowledge, processes, run books and experience. BTA works to build customers’ competence and confidence in performing these upgrades by offering comprehensive training, mentoring, detailed methods of procedure and runbooks.

Need Data Center Help? 

Working with BTA eases the learning curve for data center maintenance and visibility, and we accelerate deployment while enabling your team through proven mentoring programs. Register for a Data Center performance assessment that will give you a current state of your business-critical systems and a path to updating and maintaining your infrastructure. 

Please register here: