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

Will You Throw Up When Your Security Incident Hits The Evening News?

Reporting Security Breaches: Back in 2003 and Now.  What's  changed?

By Ed Higgins

In 2003, an article was posted that presented a hypothetical university security incident in which hundreds of thousands of historic student records and payment card information was compromised. The systems were in place (although nothing is 100%), the personnel were trained, but the study suggested that the university was not prepared to address the public when the story broke on the 6pm Evening News.

So, what has changed? Have laws and regulations been prescriptive enough to educate businesses, universities, and other establishments on their requirements to disclose the incident to the public?

Do entities know what to do when "it" happens? How to notify the victims? Do you notify the victims? You can't really hide it from the public it and keep it private, can you?  Did you know that for several years United States laws, such as California SB-1386, mandate disclosure of a security breach to potentially affected victims. No more head in the sand....


The depth and speed at which cyber crimes occur has significantly changed.  Formerly a form of crash-and-dash, today's cyber criminals operate more stealthy with better tools performing significant reconnaissance before they strike. No longer about fame [the notoriety of spray-painting a web page], these criminals carry out well planned, focused and financially motivated attacks, striking at the perfect moment.


The key to adequate incident response today is speed to identify, stop, and address the situation often using outside private investigators for independence as well as competence in the subject matter. This all has to happen much much much much faster than in the past. Bureaucratic organizations move aside!

Based on studying the incident response processes and situations during real-life actual incident investigations with hundreds of clients, I would suggest that we have a lot of work to do. We kinda need to reinvent our incident detection and response processes.

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


Until next time, "Watch Out For Yourself".

Ed

DCIM: Strategic and Intrinsic Value

The Role of DCIM Coupled with ITIL/ITSM 

By Ed Higgins


As a rule of thumb, the more integral your Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) solution is to your existing critical management processes , the more strategic and successful your DCIM investment will be. The more flexible and integration-worthy the DCIM solution is, the larger the population of DCIM users (stakeholders) will be. When many stakeholders with diverse disciplines utilize DCIM to its fullest, by enabling those individual stakeholders to "work and think within their own disciple" yet share the work they do transparently to the other business stakeholders, the greater the consequential financial benefits will be from the DCIM for your enterprise business.

DCIM is a relatively new category of IT management and unfortunately it has many interpretations depending on which vendor you are talking to. By generally accepted researcher definitions, DCIM is defined as the integration of information technology (IT) and facility management disciplines to centralize monitoring, management and intelligent capacity planning of a data center’s critical systems.

Achieved through the implementation of specialized software, DCIM enables a common, real-time monitoring and management framework for bringing together formerly disparate management systems spanning the entirety of the IT and Facility infrastructures.

Analysts’ definitions vary and in general are very broadly defined which has created an atmosphere where new vendors are arriving every day with their own interpretation. Power strip manufacturers are claiming a stake in the DCIM market. So are diesel generator manufacturers. These are point-solutions and should be properly reconciled by the Analysts.  The DCIM market promised great growth. Couple this with the fact that the big power equipment providers and a few well-funded startups pay tens of millions of dollars per year to these analysts. Now you might see why there is so much confusion and conflict among the DCIM market.

Many potential DCIM customers start their research and investigation of available DCIM solutions in a very hands-on tactical mode. DCIM comes in all shapes and sizes, and in fact includes everything from sensors and power monitoring, to life cycle management suites. Each potential customer looks at the pieces that appear to have the most relevance to their management goals today. They start their DCIM journey looking for solutions that fit into their existing ways of doing business. New tools applied to obsolete approaches is a waste of your time and money.

Fortunately for astute customers, they are beginning to see the much greater opportunity and their former tactical thinking is quickly transitioning towards strategic value, wider audiences, and having broader impact on the entire picture in alignment with the requirements of the business.  We've seen a similar positive transformation in the storage market where tiered storage concepts are considered. The same transformation and cost-to-value appreciation is represented in the hot, cloud market.

Even the role of the CIO has transformed from a "deliver ALL services at ANY cost" approach to a cost-to-value approach, provide the right level of service, based on VALUE to the enterprise, where cost tolerance, resilience, reliability, longevity, growth and/or reduction are now vital criteria.

DCIM Becomes a Strategic Investment When Connected to ITIL/ITSM

We are beginning to see a fundamental shift in discipline and accountability. Everyone wants to look forward rather than backward, and relatively few are defending their previous methods. ITIL-like approaches (anything that enables discipline and accountability) are much more the operational standards in this new climate.  It is within these transformational shifts that DCIM thrives. DCIM solutions must complement and integrate with existing management applications and DCIM vendors cannot force their preconceived methodology upon any established enterprise.  Some DCIM solutions boast workflow and ticket management processes, which should infuriate the DCIM customer.  While most DCIM vendors can bring a lot of best-practices to customers, many have become so enthralled with their own ideals they make claims that they cannot back up.

IT Service Management or ITSM is the process-based practices intended to align the delivery of information technology services with the business needs of the enterprise.

DCIM when implemented strategically marries the physical infrastructure required to ITSM.

When DCIM is aligned closely with ITSM, it becomes embedded with change management.

When the role of DCIM is successful, then the gaps between facilities, IT and the business will radically close, the determination of "who pays the power/utility bill" will be self-evident, previously hidden areas for cost reduction become clear, planning and deployment operations become transparent,

DCIM directly supports optimization and transformation, which is already occurring across your IT structure whether you are part of the equation or not.

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

Until next time,

Ed

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

DigitaIDWorld 2009 - Looking out at the Crowd

By Ed Higgins


I just returned home from the Digital ID World 2009 #DIDW conference in Las Vegas where I presented a couple of breakout sessions focused on Identity Management and was a panelist in the conference grand finale discussion.  What an honor and a treat!  This, just after returning from an emergency trip to Dubai, UAE and Pretoria, South Africa. 

The breakouts, written on the 27 hour plane rides, were aimed at providing guidance for integrating best practices into IDM initiatives, and presenting a perspective that employee awareness was among the most important keys to success and return on investment.  There were many great breakouts and keynotes that I would have loved to attend them, had I not been presenting myself. I mean, I wanted to be a student rather than the teacher. Some topics that greatly interested me involved the identity impact of cloud, legal implications, facebook as an identity tool, and several others sessions - all very interesting and compelling.

The finale of the conference was a panel discussion entitled "Conversational Crystal Ball Look into the Future of Identity Management". I was most humbled and privileged to have been invited as member of this panel along side noted celebrity security gurus like Jeff Jonas and Doc Searls, and moderated by Bob Bragdon, Editor of CSO Magazine.  I was immensely flattering to have been asked participate with such a prestigious group of gentlemen in the finale panel, a much anticipated and talked about event during the conference.    I owe my gratitude to dear friend and professional colleague Lafe Low, without who's generous invitation and introduction this would not have been possible.

With R.E.M's Radio Free Europe blaring as the intro song, and hundreds of attendees filing into the hall, anyone in my fortunate shoes mightn't help but to feel a bit of a "celebrity moment", especially following the aforementioned three exceptionally bright gentlemen onto the stage...

I had a blast, and I think we visualized the future of Identity and Identity Management Pretty well.

Anyway, enough for now...

Until next time, "Watch Out For Yourself".

~e

Recognition is nice, but not the motivation

Hi All,

I am so honored to having been highlighted in CIOTimes for my contributions to Information Security practices serving the global outsourcing community for Affiliated Computer Services. 

We have an incredible team and I am fortunate to be surrounded by 150 of the industry's best people.   

I had a disruptive vision to embed information security services into all new outsourcing contracts, especially at a time when no other outsourcers were doing that.  None of them... I knew there was something better, something more progressive and proactive that would ensure protections for our customers and their employees.  We were winning "your mess for less" agreements where InfoSec was an after-thought (or not even a thought at all).  So we convinced our CEO to underwrite a corporate security policy that required a minimum baseline security standard across all outsourcing contracts - this to serve as a significant differentiation over our competition who were afraid to raise that bar or disrupt their deals.  So, I did, as did our entire team.    The CEO signed the policy that I wrote.  

Then, we used that very baseline standard, as a means to go back to every single outsourcing customer to upsell them on the new services we created.  This worked perfectly - we became a profit center as opposed to a cost center, and we immediately began to see every IT outsourcer started to mimic what we were doing.  The outsourcing services space was finally transformed; our business was thriving and agreements from here forward would include security as an important part of the business. 

So thank you to CIOTIMES for recognizing me and our incredible team and thank you to our leadership for allowing us to change this one part of our business for the better. 

Until next time, be safe out there.

Ed