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