Server Racks are Just Steel Racks? IoT Rack is Coming
Server racks, the long existed infrastructure are necessary for every data center. However, why do data centers need the racks? What's the fundamental reason that racks are needed? Personally, I think it's a tool for managing the servers easily and efficiently. With racks, we are able to rise density of data center, standardize the installation of devices, make a organized and simple environment for operators.
But data center is prospering like never before. With the growth in cloud, big data and colocation, data center management are becoming more challenging too. The frequency operation and big server amount cause increasing complexity in management. Counting on human solely is not feasible for big data center anymore, we need other managing tools. Some platform like DCIM and CMDB are making the management easier, but seems that's not enough, the data collection is still counted on operators, which means the errors are inevitable. Due to the inevitable error in management, for example, the wrong record in device movement, the inaccuracy in power data, unknown running status and environment parameter and so forth. To automate the data collection will be the next step for unmanned and automated data center, some companies are working on it now. Servers' physical existence and position can be detected by IoT server rack now, some air conditioner and power supply module are adding the data port, together with the agent in servers to monitor the running status, the sound managing solution will be workable for big data centers.
The most surprising part of the whole solution is surely the IoT server rack, if you manage tens of thousands servers, you probably knew this idea before. For data center operators, servers' lifecycle management is a big task, although they could rely on the auto-notification from DCIM, but when they make any add/remove/change to the device, the position of each server still have to be recorded by the operator, who never wanted any mistake but always made it without awareness. How the IoT racks help in this? The position recording will be done by the rack automatically, without any manual recording, and the data goes to your database via TCP/IP. You don't have to do the complex recording anymore and will not miss any server even hundreds of changes happen in your data center everyday.
As the fast growth of data center, the traditional managing method will be outdated, and as the managing tool, traditional server rack is not enough for future data center operation. What people need is a more efficient and effective tool, with the capability to identify and positioning the server, IoT server rack is going to play that role in the future.
