7 Features Of A Top DCIM Solution
By Mark Gaydos, Chief Marketing Officer, Nlyte Software
According to IBM, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are produced each and every day from smart sensors, social media, texts, digital pictures and video, purchase and banking transactions, cell phones, and more. Now consider that all this data has to be processed, stored, and made available anytime, anywhere. Doing the heavy lifting to process all this information are hundreds of data centers. In a similar manner as IBM tracks all these statistics, data center managers must also track the statistics of their facility operations. This entails tracking all of their equipment and energy costs, as well as people and processes.
Helping data center managers complete their daunting tasks is an innovative set of solutions called Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) and Data Center Service Management (DCSM). These solutions are a must have tool that extract often hidden data, locked in proprietary software and hardware devices, and normalize this information into understandable dashboard displays. Following are seven features data center and facility managers find the most compelling.
- Energy Monitoring
Data centers require a lot of energy to operate every day, around the clock. According to the EPA, data centers use 20 times more energy per square foot than your typical office building. Not only are these facilities packed with servers, which require power 24/7/365, but those servers create heat, which must be remediated, which means rising cooling costs.
Since most data center operators aim to maximize the current power infrastructure, a DCIM solution helps identify idle equipment and stranded power as well as visually displaying possible areas for improvement.
Gartner underscores this value by stating DCIM tools can reduce operating expenses by as much as 20 percent and extend the life of a data center by as much as five years. This is accomplished by allowing operators to use the available space, cooling, and energy capacity in the most efficient manner, to delay or eliminate the need for physical plant expansion.
- Real-Time Temperature Information
Cooling costs are often the largest expense for data center operations; DCIM solutions can easily help curb these costs. Historically, data centers have been overcooled because data center managers lacked real-time information about their facility’s temperature. This lack of information compels managers to keep temperatures very low — sometimes creating 45 percent higher energy costs.
In order to safely operate at higher temperatures, data center operators can use DCIM tools to properly measure and monitor temperature in real time. Operators who use DCIM solutions have achieved a 4 percent cost savings for every degree they safely raise the overall data center temperature.
- Performance Management
Accurate management of a complex data center environment is often difficult to achieve. Operators must keep tabs on many IT infrastructure components, as well as power, cooling, HVAC, and other facilities-related equipment. DCIM tools help by simplifying the process of adding new or moving existing equipment, with real-time information about space, cooling, and power capacity. This not only saves operational costs, it boosts the availability of computing services.
In addition, these tools show how power and cooling are operating at top energy efficiency levels or where improvements can be made. This involves using real-time PUE and DCiE calculations, which can help determine the carbon footprint impact of the data center’s energy consumption. These solutions also track the operational performance and energy efficiency of individual circuits through the entire infrastructure. Now performance levels can easily be viewed at individual rack or room levels or even scaled up to view each region within a global footprint.
- Real-Time Alarming — Alerting
Maintaining the infrastructure’s reliability is one of the most challenging parts of a data center manager’s job. They know all too well that every second of data center downtime can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
A DCIM solution mitigates these risks by pro-actively managing data center load trends and capacity. This tool informs managers when a limit is approaching — whether it is a temperature, a capacity threshold, power level or another definable point. This proactive alert enables managers to take immediate corrective actions.
- Resource Management
In order to have an accurate, up-to-the-minute view of a data center, a facility manager needs to know where the assets are, what they are doing, and what they’re connected to. With a DCIM solution, data center managers can easily access real-time, precise asset inventory, including lifecycle details. Furthermore, they can track an asset from the time it hits the loading dock all the way to the decommissioning. This facilitates warranty renewals, maintenance contracts and end of useful life decisions. A floor plan on which assets can be both viewed and placed keeps all team members up to date.
- Workflow Management
A data center’s greatest asset is of course, its people. Providing the staff tools critical to perform tasks more efficiently and with the least amount of error is an integral part of successful operations of a mission-critical facility. With a workflow management solution, detailed, visual work orders minimize human error and make individuals more efficient by providing task focus and progress status, with measurable, repeatable processes. Integrated workflow also expedites cooperation among different teams, and based on a group’s availability, facilitates scheduling, and management.
- Integration
While a DCIM solution is the foundation of monitoring a data center responsibly, DCSM takes that crucial step further to a true service-based environment, adding a clear view into data center people and processes. Integrating a DCIM platform with IT service management systems allows for an end-to-end management interface reaching from infrastructure through business process.
These tools add the ability to manage workflows and IT integrations, giving IT and facility managers the added transparency they need for a holistic understanding of the facility to deliver compute/storage capacity and performance. Furthermore, DCSM adds agility to the data center by reducing costs and increasing operational efficiency, through asset and workflow management, virtualization, and change management integration. Data center managers need more than just point solutions; they need complete solutions that actually improve services while decreasing OPEX. Simply put: The combination of DCIM and DCSM solutions provides a complete, end-to-end, real-time view into data center efficiency with transparent views into proprietary systems.
Conclusion
Compute power needs keep increasing and data centers continue to grow in size and complexity. The question is no longer whether a data center needs a DCIM/DCSM solution, but why should a data center manager risk operational inefficiencies or outages when there is a proven solution to help increase optimization and stability.
Mark Gaydos is Chief Marketing Officer for Nlyte Software, the leading data center service management (DCSM) solution provider for seamlessly automating data center operations and infrastructure into an enterprise’s IT ecosystem.