Who is Rackwise? And, what do we do?

Rackwise DCiM X is Enterprise-Class in DCIM Software

By Ed Higgins

Be forewarned, this is a commercial. 

Rackwise  DCiM enables complete Visualization of your entire data center infrastructure from all of your the data center locations world-wide to power and cooling equipment to all of the racks to the devices (and modules/components inside each device) and full cable management (power and network).  Rackwise  extends this visualization strategy into Cloud and Virtualized environments. Extensive Documentation capabilities are built into the solution for comprehensively managing today’s complex and globally disparate data center environments. Modeling, and unlimited “what if” scenarios as well as capacity analytics are core components of our solution (superior to all other solutions). Rackwise  provides you the ability to analyze data in tabular and rich graphical formats. Make informed decisions, enable day to day efficiencies, distribute compute services using global options for "best-cost" services, and efficient operations necessary for proactive Management of tomorrow's data centers, TODAY, with Rackwise .

Intelligent Placement, a powerful capability found inside Rackwise since 2005, is facilitated by Rackwise‘s revolutionary product functionality to identify the “best place” to deploy an asset based on available capacity for power, current, cooling, weight, contiguous rack units (RU), available power and network ports, and other criteria based on the business requirements needed for a given asset.  This dramatically helps data center managers put critical assets where resilience, capacity, and redundancy are optimal, similar to the industry methods leveraged in the tiered data storage space where you put your critical data where the resilience is greatest and your less critical data on less costly infrastructure.  Rackwise helps customer identify these opportunities and optimize their equipment based on the needs of the business customer.

Rich Visualization provides a dashboard display for a high level view of the data center.  Selectable layers can be added to display power consumption, heat generation, current, and either power or signal port availability. Additional layers can be added to display door swings, hot cold aisles, location and density of perforated tiles, etc., to create truly customized displays. Users can drill through to greater detail, from the data center, to the rack, to the device, and components, including: blades, power supplies, drives, etc.

Detailed Documentation provides clear and descriptive reporting on the IT infrastructure. Powerful Modeling allows the user to perform unlimited “What if” scenarios. Rackwise  quickly determines the impact of data center consolidations, or the resource consumption associated with new data centers. The user can make detailed comparisons of proposed equipment upgrades versus the current environment. Trend and historical reporting provides crystal clear visibility into where resources are being consumed over time, and when they’re likely to be exhausted.

Comprehensive Analysis provides instant access to critical information and enables decision making capability on key data center issues. Direct access to information such as availability of space, power, heat and cooling, port availability, and remaining weight capacity in racks, allows the user to make critical decisions with confidence. Rackwise Advanced Power Management provides the ability to explore the power system, understand the redundancy levels of critical servers, and other equipment. Rackwise advanced power also provides full understanding of the impact of power source, UPS, or PDU shutdowns. Further the system determines if the remaining power infrastructure will be over taxed in the event of an outage, resulting in a cascading failure situation.

With over 100 standard out-of-the-box Reports, who needs to custom reports?  Rackwise Standard Reports range from assembly report that provides step by step instructions to assemble and cable a solution, to connectivity reports, to simulating a cascading power or equipment failure to improve resilience, to delivering weekly or daily power consumption reports, environmental reports, and asset management reports. If you want custom reports, we also include an enterprise-grade reporting engine to easily create sophisticated reports designed for your unique business model. If you don't have time or resources to make any customizations to your reports, then Rackwise can do it for you.

Sophisticated Management capabilities allow the user to deploy and decommission devices quickly and easily. Track equipment through receiving, staging, commissioning, decommissioning, and storage. In addition, Rackwise tracks changes to the data center infrastructure at the data center, rack, and device levels. Custom properties can be used to map applications or other information to devices, providing a clear understanding of what impact the shutdown or failure of the device will have. Planning for new equipment is greatly simplified with Rackwise ability to locate and reserve space, power, cooling, ports, and weight load availability. Additionally, advanced searching is made easy to help you locate physical infrastructure components based on your search criteria.

Don't you owe it to your CEO to explore Rackwise today?  Rackwise can help you save at least 20% on your power costs, and reduce your costs in many other areas.  If you spend over a million $$ on your annual power bill, then that's a ton of immediate bottom-line value - and that's just the start.

I hope you enjoyed this article, and I hope it was helpful.  

Until next time,

Ed

Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM)

Three Realities in the Data Center

By Ed Higgins


The data center is the critical nerve center that ensures optimal conditions, security, and reliable power are always available for a business's IT infrastructures.  Data center businesses that sell customers computer hosting, collocation, and managed cloud services, all live or die by touting close to zero downtime and by operating efficiently to create a profit out of highly competitive and commodit-ized  services.  Failure is not an option for those in the data center infrastructure business.  The following are some of the most common realities that lead to capacity, efficiency, and business challenges for those that operate data centers as a business or for their corporate enterprise.

1) Data centers commonly over-provision because they can't predict when demand will increase or when their available capacity for power, cooling, CPU, and rack space will run out. As the need for faster compute service provisioning increases, there exists an imperative prerequisite for visualization of available assets, and predicting capacity run-out, and removing equipment that is no longer in use.

2) Underutilized equipment including servers, blades, virtual servers, switches, power distribution, battery backup, and other forms of data center equipment left powered on wastes enormous amounts of power, rack space, and cooling. This can be avoided by powering off the unused equipment. The problem is that data center managers don't have the tools they need to visualize what is being utilized, what's not, and how much capacity is available. Thus, they can't perform accurate "what-if analysis" to identify opportunities to save space, conserve energy, and decrease their cooling costs.  Furthermore, nearly 95% of all data centers use spreadsheets to manage their business which is an ineffective method for dynamic resource management.

3) Data center managers have difficulty with locating physical assets placed in racks throughout their data centers. Over time, many data centers lose track of where equipment is located and have little or no knowledge about the network and power cabling for the equipment or its physical change history.  They even have difficulty determining the business impact if they shut off a server.  In fact, some data center managers simply refuse to power off equipment because they don't know how the shutdown may impact other equipment, services or customers.

The solution for these and many other problems is to implement a Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) solution.

1) DCIM will help identify and eliminate wasted power and cooling, reclaim rack space, improve asset management and visualization, increase operational efficiency, and lower your carbon footprint. All of these can produce recurring savings of $1M USD or more per year for most large enterprise data centers.

2) There are a many companies who claim to be DCIM. However, most of these companies just skim the surface of DCIM and/or do not provide data center managers with the information or capabilities they need to manage and visualize their assets, identify power and cooling savings, effectively manage their power and cable plants, audit their asset inventory immediate, or produce meaningful reports necessary to run their business.

3) Top-gun DCIM vendors, such as my company, Rackwise, fully understand these critical challenges and provides data center executives and technical personnel the vision, strategy, framework and the tools they need to save money immediately and operate more efficiently towards Green Data Center status. 

Rackwise was an undisputed pioneer and thought leader in data center infrastructure management tools, long before researchers including Gartner, 451 Group, and IDC created the DCIM product category.  Rackwise DCiM is an enterprise-class DCIM Suite that provides everything right out of the box including an ROI in just a few short months, consistently helps customers save 20% or more in their power bill, and enables them to radically improve their data center management practices.

I hope you enjoyed this article, and I hope it was helpful.  

Until next time,

Ed