As Tom Brady once said, “if you don’t play to win, don’t play at all.” This mantra is reflected in Brady’s TB12 Method, a holistic lifecycle based on 12 principles that make up the optimal approach to exercise, training and living a life of vitality. It’s built on the premise of stopping an accident prior to it happening through pre-habitation and taking intelligent, strategic preventative measures. And while implementing all 12 principles is not required, their effect is cumulative: the more you can incorporate, the better your results will be.

While this methodology applies to training superior athletes, data center managers have their own set of principles to ensure optimal data center performance. What we’ve dubbed the DCM10 Method, there are 10 fundamental steps every data center manager should use to evaluate their current data center and help transform its functionality. Similar to the TB12 Method, while not all of these steps are required to create a successful strategy, the more best practices applied will result in higher performance across the board.

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As spring finally rolls around and the frost melts away (except here in New England), the change in seasons not only brings us ultraviolet B-induced vitamin D, but also shines some healthy sunlight on the clutter the long winter leaves behind in its wake, including both at home and in the data center. With spring, comes an opportunity to reevaluate data center cleaning habits and question whether a more practical, day-to-day strategy would benefit data center managers in the long run.

Instead of enduring the spring cleaning process in the data center, data center managers should rethink their current cleaning strategy, which often leads to seasonal operational overhauls, and instead consider a new and more efficient method that benefits from granular operational data and analytics. So, with the spring solstice upon us, here are a few tips to enable data center managers to reap the advantages of “year-round cleaning” rather than looking for that old and tired broom.

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When February rolls around each year, every football fan knows what’s right around the corner – it’s time for the Super Bowl! This game brings together the two best teams in the National Football League to compete for the title, with all 32 teams battling throughout the year to earn that top spot. Believe it or not, this same competition is very similar to the data center industry.

In fact, the NFL and data centers have many similarities. From the fundamental skills needed to be successful, to the strong team-centric leadership required and the same competition always at the top of their league or industry, below are a few examples of how the NFL and data centers have more in common than you may think.

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With the happiest of holidays soon upon us and New Year’s right around the corner, now is an appropriate time to reflect on data center managers around the world so that all their days may be merry and bright. But wait, is that an IT staff member attempting to forecast capacity with his head buried in an MS Excel spreadsheet? And another, tiredly walking the data center with a Stanley tape measure hooked on his belt while daydreaming of a white Christmas, just like the ones he used to know?

Our hearts go out to them, knowing that without accurate intel these data center managers won’t be able to take timely and appropriate actions, to say nothing about missing out on their CFOs’ figgy pudding. But they are not alone.

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According to Gartner, more than $1 trillion in IT spending will be directly or indirectly affected by the shift to cloud over the next five years. Many research firms point to hybrid cloud as a fastest-growing segment, including MarketsandMarkets, which predicts that demand will increase at a compound annual growth rate of 27 percent through 2019, outpacing the IT market overall.

There’s no question that cloud technologies have improved time to market, lowered operational and capital expenditures, and provided organizations with the ability to dynamically adjust provisioning to meet changing needs globally. And yet, as many businesses shift from on-premise, private clouds to public or hybrid models, a myriad of technical questions and business concerns come into play as compute, network and storage resources are further virtualized.

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What do the peaking colors of fall foliage, the nighttime appearance of the hunter’s moon, and escalating college football and NFL rivalries indicate? That autumn has officially arrived, and Thanksgiving is right around the corner.

Thanksgiving is primarily associated with family and friends gathering together, enjoying an uncomfortable amount of turkey, stuffing and pumpkin pie, and then lapsing into a tryptophan and sugar-induced state of semi-consciousness. While Americans may also associate Thanksgiving with the Plymouth colonists and Wampanoag Indians, the holiday actually spans cultures, continents and millennia. In ancient times, the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans all feasted and paid tribute to their deities as an annual celebration of the harvest and its bounty.

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In any enterprise – large and small – bottom-line ROI is arguably the biggest factor driving business decisions. Whether switching from PCs to Macs, investing in new travel and expense management software or integrating data center solutions, every business unit, from HR to sales and IT, must prove the value that new processes and offerings will have on the enterprises’ bottom line. The problem? Getting buy-in from all business groups, from the C-Suite on down, can be a serious undertaking often halting or ceasing potential implementation. When it comes to the data center, no one knows this better than data center managers who must work tirelessly with C-Suite to showcase the value and benefits of next generations data center software solutions.

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With the summer solstice in the rear view mirror, those of us north of the equator are preparing for the true summer heat to arrive in force this next month. While BBQs, boating, and your preferred beverage may be the first things on your mind for this next month, many folks in the data center world greet summer with a different attitude entirely. 

For starters, the period from June to August is Outage Season. Data from previous years shows more centers head offline during this time period than any other 3-month span of your calendar. This includes both poor performing infrastructure to full-scale outages. In addition, data center managers often fight higher energy bills due to hotter external temperatures that drive up the heat inside your facility.

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As April brings the best college basketball teams together for the final leg of March Madness, college basketball is in full swing. With all this attention on the top teams and programs in country, there is more than one parallel between data center managers and NCAA basketball coaches.

Their management techniques and job descriptions often align: optimizing lineups to ensure they have the best team on the floor in the final seconds of a big game, or stressing teamwork and cooperation during tight deadlines, outages or other time-sensitive situations. Coaches and data center managers play a similar role to ensure their team (or infrastructure) is ready to perform when it matters most.

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When Henry Ford introduced the Model T in the fall of 1908, he likely didn’t comprehend the full scope of events he would set in motion. Come 1914, and Ford’s production line had reduced assembly times from 12 hours to less than two and a half hours, slashed the going price of an automobile, and redefined the working wage of factory employees, ultimately putting more than 15 million Model T’s on the road and igniting the entire automotive industry in the years to come.

Competition often leads to innovation and progress for other industry players. One modern equivalent of this can be seen in the rise of public and private cloud providers like Amazon and Microsoft.  AWS’ sales numbers recently topped $12 billion, up nearly 55 percent from the same period last year. Meanwhile, Microsoft continues to push ahead and is projected to reach $20 billion in annual cloud revenue by June 2018. As these powerhouses and others like Oracle and Google continue to see widespread adoption across industries, other players have stepped in to consume their piece of the $204 billion-dollar cloud infrastructure pie, leading to an ecosystem of cloud and data center partners that continue to push the technology envelope to expand capabilities of these offerings. 

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Whether it’s a new exercise program, volunteering for charitable causes or deciding to go gluten-free, studies have shown that nearly half of people who fully commit to New Year’s resolutions were over 10 times more likely to succeed at realizing real change as compared to 4 percent who do not.

The concept of New Year’s resolutions dates back to the Babylonians, who at the start of each year made promises to their gods to return borrowed objects and pay their debts. Romans, too, would begin each year by making promises to Janus, the god of beginnings and transitions, for whom the month of January is named.

+ Also on Network World: More proof the cloud is winning big +

But wait, dear data center manager. You say you don’t have time to do gut-crunchers every morning and balk at the prospect of giving up bread and pasta? To be perfectly clear, I understand but do not condone your lack of commitment. Change is difficult. And besides, some who follow cultural trends claim that dad bods are slowly coming into fashion.

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