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Solutions for Minimizing Server Downtime

Chris Adams

As we've seen, hardware is at the root of a large proportion of data center outages, and the costs and consequences are often exacerbated when VMs are affected. The best answer, therefore, is for IT pros to get back to basics.

Start with Part 1: Complacency Kills Uptime in Virtualized Environments

Just as drivers wearing seatbelts should still use turn signals (even though many don't), data center managers should continue to take the usual precautions to protect against equipment-related outages. Put simply:

Attend to the hardware

In the rush to implement the latest technologies, don't overlook the fundamentals, such as routine server maintenance, UPS tests and upgrades, and facility checks for hotspots, air flow problems, and other issues.

Integrate monitoring and response

Only about half of IT organizations rely on their monitoring tool or ticketing system to activate a response team. This is a lost opportunity for accelerating break/fix. So is the failure to utilize newer AI-driven hardware monitoring technologies which are becoming highly accessible.

Have parts on standby

It's no good to go searching for spares after a hardware failure occurs. Spare parts should be on site for mission critical systems or available for quick delivery in other cases.

Invest in expertise

Having the right people with the right skills is essential. Unfortunately, today's tight IT labor market is making it difficult to find and afford talent. Data center managers should consider whether they have the budget to build comprehensive engineering capabilities or if they are better off sourcing it from a partner.

It can be hard to manage these tasks in addition to the many responsibilities that have been piled on data center personnel over the past decade. In many cases, the easiest and most affordable option is to hand off the bulk of the hardware "to do" list to a third-party provider specializing in IT support. That way someone else can effectively address the risk associated with hardware through 24/7 monitoring, spares management, and immediate Level 3 support while the business gets back to business.

Hot Topics

The Latest

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...

Solutions for Minimizing Server Downtime

Chris Adams

As we've seen, hardware is at the root of a large proportion of data center outages, and the costs and consequences are often exacerbated when VMs are affected. The best answer, therefore, is for IT pros to get back to basics.

Start with Part 1: Complacency Kills Uptime in Virtualized Environments

Just as drivers wearing seatbelts should still use turn signals (even though many don't), data center managers should continue to take the usual precautions to protect against equipment-related outages. Put simply:

Attend to the hardware

In the rush to implement the latest technologies, don't overlook the fundamentals, such as routine server maintenance, UPS tests and upgrades, and facility checks for hotspots, air flow problems, and other issues.

Integrate monitoring and response

Only about half of IT organizations rely on their monitoring tool or ticketing system to activate a response team. This is a lost opportunity for accelerating break/fix. So is the failure to utilize newer AI-driven hardware monitoring technologies which are becoming highly accessible.

Have parts on standby

It's no good to go searching for spares after a hardware failure occurs. Spare parts should be on site for mission critical systems or available for quick delivery in other cases.

Invest in expertise

Having the right people with the right skills is essential. Unfortunately, today's tight IT labor market is making it difficult to find and afford talent. Data center managers should consider whether they have the budget to build comprehensive engineering capabilities or if they are better off sourcing it from a partner.

It can be hard to manage these tasks in addition to the many responsibilities that have been piled on data center personnel over the past decade. In many cases, the easiest and most affordable option is to hand off the bulk of the hardware "to do" list to a third-party provider specializing in IT support. That way someone else can effectively address the risk associated with hardware through 24/7 monitoring, spares management, and immediate Level 3 support while the business gets back to business.

Hot Topics

The Latest

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...