In today’s IT-dependent world, the data centre plays an integral role and determines whether your business achieves success or failure, profit or deficit, market gains or losses. Data centres are the factories of the internet age, providing the infrastructure for the delivery of digital business services.
It can be said that the performance of the data centre has become intrinsically linked to an organisation’s overall success. Thus, to remain profitable and competitive, organisations need to ensure that every resource is consumed economically and every asset is optimally utilised. Given such high stakes, organisations need to be able to bridge every performance gap, being it resources, costs, availability or capacity.
This truly holistic management view requires the modelling and analytical capabilities that are only available in a Data Centre Infrastructure Management (DCIM) solution, working in conjunction with more traditional systems and network management platforms. DCIM tools provide integrated processes for asset management, space management, environmental management, access and control, reporting and alarming, and systems management, all accessible from a single unified management interface. The collected data from across all these disciplines is digitally modelled to deliver a complete picture of the actual data centre status. Additionally, DCIM helps attain visibility into computing fabrics, enabling a more complete understanding of the relationship between the physical environment and the virtual workloads they support so that production environments can be optimised for performance and cost-effectiveness.
DCIM provides an integrated framework and automated formulas needed to convert metrics into meaningful analytics. From centralising data collection, managing physical capacity and assets, and integrating with critical IT management applications, DCIM unifies the processes, tools and raw data needed to provide an accurate view of data centre performance across both IT and facilities. Simplifying IT management with DCIM is also instrumental in enabling greater IT flexibility. With all critical infrastructure information easily accessible through a single interface, IT administrators are able to respond to business requests quicker. Organisations employing virtualisation implementations can also make decisions on expanding or improving their environments more rapidly by mapping the abstracted environments to their physical hosts in the DCIM models. Such models provide an immediate identification of available space, power, thermal, and networking resources so new systems can be rapidly provisioned and optimally configured before thresholds are exceeded.
However, in order to achieve the above goals, one has to go through what might seem like a daunting task of integrating all systems. In many cases, a Building Management System (BMS) could already have some existing sensors connected to it, which could be used to provide information to the DCIM system. One should take into consideration the possibility of acquiring a DCIM system from the same BMS vendor, in order to minimise systems integration costs. Apart from software costs, one should consider the licensing mechanism of the vendor chosen. Many vendors have additional license costs which are typically based on the number of monitored devices. As with any other system, user training is required to make the most effective use of the system. Some DCIM systems have more intuitive interfaces than others and this could have an impact on how much or how little extra cost the company will incur on user training.
To conclude with, as already discussed, through thorough analysis of data gathered from the data centre, IT personnel have the capability to make better and more informed decisions on the management of the data centre. Nonetheless, data centre managers also have the consolidated data needed to provide vision and direction for the company and support initiatives, such as sustainability, while remaining within budget and reaching projected earnings. If it all sounds like a lot of information, it is! In today’s nomenclature-inclined speak, it can be referred to as ‘Big Data’ - a term for data sets that are so large or complex that traditional data processing applications are inadequate. Gaining advantage from big data is all about making quick, informed and impactful decisions, something companies should keep in mind if they wish to succeed.
