Investing in Automated Data Centre Infrastructure

Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) means many things to many people. It is a relatively young term that represents an emerging class of IT physical infrastructure solutions, one that has already generated enormous market acceptance. If you ask the executives who lie awake at night worrying about the tens of thousands of IT assets under their supervision, they’ll explain it as being a means of support in the realms of IT.

Today’s IT decision-makers are starving for the information, insight, and command-and-control that a true Data Center Infrastructure Management solution offers. They need to be able to see, understand, manage, and optimize the myriad of complex interrelationships that drive the modern data center – one of the most complex entities on earth. They need holistic information and visibility into the entire IT infrastructure, information that that is instantly meaningful and actionable. Data Center Infrastructure Management integrates facets of system management with building management and energy management, with a focus on IT assets and the physical infrastructure needed to support them. There also needs to be consideration in part of the IT assets, infrastructure and resource in place to be able to meet the needs of the end user.

A true Data Center Infrastructure Management solution can scale to manage hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of assets sitting in the world’s largest global IT infrastructure environments. All of the servers, switches, blades, etc. and the myriad of facilities and building systems that constitute the physical infrastructure. Not just in the data center, but across the entire enterprise. Because the walls between IT and facilities are coming down. If the vendor cannot scale to reliably meet the challenge of convergence at the enterprise level – handcuffed by product limitations or lack of experience – then it is not a complete DCIM vendor. Executives today cannot afford to mistake monitoring for managing. Monitoring energy usage at the device level gives you mere data – a single-dimensional perspective on a specific device at a specific point in time, without context. The data must be deciphered or assimilated so you can make sense of it.

Managing energy usage across the power chain requires context-rich information about all of the interrelationships that exist between assets – holistic information that is immediately meaningful and actionable, and lets you track power all the way from the transformer on the street down to every device on every rack.