AI in Data Center Management: What It Means for Staffing and Processes

Critical Thinking is a weekly column on innovation in data center infrastructure design and management. The end game for data center infrastructure management (DCIM) software is that it eventually enables self-managing, or fully autonomic, data centers. The hope is that AI-driven management software (likely cloud-based) will monitor and control IT and facilities infrastructure, as well as applications, seamlessly and holistically – potentially across multiple sites. Cooling, power, compute, workloads, storage, and networking will flex dynamically to achieve maximum efficiency, productivity, and availability. Facilities equipment and IT will also be self-healing to some degree by applying cloud-based analytics to sensor data harvested from thousands of sites to guide and enact targeted predictive and preventive maintenance programs. Spare parts will be ordered, tested, and installed (perhaps by dexterous robots) to exactly align with when they are required to avoid failures but also to avoid unnecessary maintenance and testing.