Data center management

Data center management is the collection of tasks performed by those responsible for managing ongoing operation of a data center. This includes Business service management and planning for the future. Historically, "data center management" was seen as something performed by employees, with the help of tools collectively called Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) tools. Both for in-house operation and outsourcing, service-level agreements must be managed to ensure data-availability. Coopetition Data center management is a growing major topic for a growing list of large companies who both compete and cooperate, including: Dell, Google, HP, IBM, Intel and Yahoo. Hardware/software vendors who are willing to live with coopetition are working on projects such as "The Distributed Management Task Force" (DMTF) with a goal of learning to "more effectively manage mixed Linux, Windows and cloud environments." With the DMTF a decade old, the list of companies is growing, and also includes companies much smaller than IBM, Microsoft, et al. Among the topics currently being explored are: scalability, securing data center networks, disaster recovery, government restrictions. Another major area is the cost of downtime regarding customer dissatisfaction & business loss, and also the "astonishing" yet hidden cost and effect regarding personnel & productivity. Business-service management (BSM) treats IT as part of the larger enterprise strategy, and helps fill the gap between business and IT. IBM notes that major problems often happen in the grey areas, particularly due to errors in the interfaces, and focuses on critical failures. Sufficient redundancy should allow failures in non-critical areas to protect the business from being affected. BSM, which is positioned above IT Service Management (ITSM), promotes a customer-centric and business-focused approach to service management, aligning business objectives with IT or ICT from strategy through to operations.