The lockdown and the shift to remote working have created an immediate need for companies to keep data centres up and running with fewer on-site personnel and increased reliance on VPN and remote-access tools and systems. Park Place Technologies, a provider of third-party IT data centre equipment management, believes the increasingly complex environments utilising multiple technologies, OEMs, platforms and locations – both physical and in the cloud – are being tested like never before.
While data centre services are classified as ‘essential’ under the government’s lockdown notification, the nature of the business is also a key factor in determining if movement restrictions apply, particularly when servicing on premise equipment.
“With remote working become the new normal, bandwidth requirements have surged for mobile and home broadband networks with the lockdown; networks need to carry higher loads for longer time than previously experienced. The ability of organisations to proactively monitor usage, predict and identify issues, manage and the optimise capabilities of their own network infrastructure in data centres across India and beyond, is also critical. Thereby, for a data centre company, providing an oversight of the health and performance of the whole multi-vendor hardware environment is the basis for the continued operation; management of services is also crucial,” says Ian Shearer, Managing Director – APAC, Park Place Technologies.
“The current COVID-19 lockdown has highlighted the need for better remote tools and management of IT infrastructure to facilitate continued uptime, allowing businesses to continue to operate. The post Covid world is, more than ever, going to need the considerable savings, greater flexibility and lifecycle extension possibilities offered by TPM, to help companies navigate the potentially difficult economic environment ahead,” he informs.
Multi-vendor capabilities are key to Park Place’s ability to offer customers a more unified and therefore, a simplified solution for managing complex data centre infrastructure in a range of environments. OEMs, typically, only offer services to maintain and manage their own technology; if they offer monitoring tools, they are only for their own equipment. Therefore, multiple OEM technologies for server, storage and networking mean multi suppliers, contracts, tools, skill sets, invoices, points of contact and management overhead.
The company offers a fully integrated, multi-vendor monitoring service that offers a single pane of glass view of the health of the entire server, storage and network infrastructure. It harnesses remote maintenance services with machine learning and AI to predict and react to failures. Automated triage and data delivery further improve the speed and accuracy of the repair process. Its fault call management systems allows the auto generation of tickets.
“Customers no longer need to generate a trouble ticket themselves, pull logs and other details, and trade calls with engineers to triage the problem. And there’s no need for our field support engineers to come and go, carrying different parts, until they find the right fix,” he says.
TPM companies such as Park Place Technologies can provide significant opportunities to drive down costs and improved RoI to organisations in India.
