Data Center Infrastructure Management... Facilities Management? IT Management? Business Management?

DCIM: What does this mean to you?  Part 1

By Ed Higgins

This is first in a three-part series on DCIM and relevance to facilities, IT, and the business.

First a few questions.

When the words "data center infrastructure management" or "dcim" comes up, what's the first thought that crosses your mind?

A) It's about Facility Management (e.g. the building, the power, the cooling)?
B) It's about IT Management (e.g. the servers, the switches, the storage, the virtual machines, the applications)?
C) It's about Business Management (the folks that pay the electric bill, pay for new data centers, acquire complimentary businesses)?
D) All of the above?

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If you guessed "D", then right you are!  Take a bow, for it is the responsibility of Facilities Management, IT Management, and the Business (three entities with different priorities) to work collaboratively as stakeholders in DCIM, whereby the data center operations must have adequate power and cooling, IT assets are run reliably to effectively align, and must execute to the requirements and cost objectives of the business.  The business involvement is critical, for it establishes the priority basis for which information and ranking relative to the requirements most and least important to the business.

Facility Perspective.

Being able to know where power, cooling, and floorspace capacities exist or where it is required, or where the hotspots or deficiencies are, or how much capacity will be needed in the future are considered to be the "Hot Topics" for any facilities experts who confront these topics every day.

When a power or cooling engineer can readily "see" where power or cooling capacity are abundant, or lacking, or about to change, then they can begin to align strategically and work tactically to anticipate the business's requirements.  Furthermore, when they can see further down the road, like 5 years further as an example, then they are truly in alignment to the direction of the business.

Imagine how a facility engineer feels when his environment is creeping towards 60 - 70% capacity and he learns that the business will bring in an acquired business of roughly half his company's existing size.    He'll likely say, "we need a bigger facility".  In some cases, this is the only way. But in more cases, he may have plenty of capacity stranded by inefficient and antiquated consumers of power, cooling and floorspace.

Wouldn't it be nice if the Facility engineer could anticipate these requirements, evaluate where stranded capacity exists, collaborate with IT to evaluate the impact of replacing costly consumers of capacity to free up all that which is stranded?  Well they can.


IT Perspective.

We have to deploy how many application servers into the already crammed facility?  Really?

Stay tuned for Part 2 regarding the IT Perspective, followed by Part 3 relating to the Business Perspective.

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

Until next time,

Ed