Organizations should better understand and leverage data center infrastructure management (DCIM)

Today, the application of data center infrastructure management (DCIM) in data centers is not new, but as it matures, its adoption will become more widespread. As data center operators seek ways to improve efficiency and availability while reducing operating costs, they are considering using DCIM software to achieve this. Industry experts predict that DCIM will grow at an annual rate of 15% in the next three years as many organizations hope to improve the efficiency of existing data centers and reduce operating costs.

If your organization has not implemented DCIM, then the various information about its data center may be scattered in multiple places. Its information is spread across numerous spreadsheets and applications, each with a different owner. In addition, it is difficult to keep all this information in different places, and if there is a conflict, it is almost impossible to know which document contains the correct information. Even in the best cases, tracking its assets and environmental information usually always provides unsatisfactory results.

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Before choosing a DCIM product, an organization must understand what it wants to achieve. Most DCIM products can provide asset lifecycle management, room capacity planning, power and temperature monitoring, power and network mapping, and functions around content analysis and trend analysis. However, unless an organization provides the necessary resources to DCIM, it may only achieve a portion of its goals and even question its true value.

To realize all that DCIM can offer, it is critical to perform all the upfront planning and provide the resources needed to keep data current.

Many organizations start using DCIM. Even before an organization selects a product, it is necessary to define exactly what it wants to get from DCIM. Doing this first makes the process of selecting a solution that best suits the organization's needs easier. The organization hopes that the deployed DCIM will help track and manage all infrastructure and IT assets in the data center and update the organization's configuration management database (CMDB) through synchronization.

The organization's configuration management database (CMDB) is synchronized with its DCIM to reduce errors by eliminating the need to keep two separate records. The organization also requires the DCIM to be able to monitor temperature and humidity throughout the data center, identify hot and cold spots in real time, and monitor data center equipment to track utilization and ensure that cooling loads are evenly distributed.

In order to adequately track and balance the power load of a data center rack, it is also required that the in-rack IT equipment be able to transmit data to the DCIM, allowing the planned configuration to be verified with actual data. Another requirement is that the power distribution units (PDUs), cabinet distribution units (CDUs), and uninterruptible power supplies (UPSs) provide real-time data to the DCIM to help identify any part of the power distribution system that is overused.

It is critical to map all power connections and network connections to record upstream and downstream dependencies. This will help organizations quickly identify systems affected by planned changes or unexpected outages. Since this is highly virtualized, it is important that DCIM is able to connect to VMware vSphere instances to map workloads to specific locations in the data center. Dashboards and reports also make it easy for organizations to parse the data being collected, provide utilization reports, and calculate power usage effectiveness (PUE).

Getting all this data into DCIM and ensuring its accuracy is not easy, and it doesn’t happen overnight. If organizations want to extract meaningful information from DCIM, it’s important to invest resources into its implementation and ongoing operation.

Some IT and data center engineers need to perform operational tasks, but as the DCIM project in the data center is implemented, organizations find that it is very important to use dedicated resources to be responsible and allocate additional resources as needed. Because the head of the IT department needs to consider the technology stacked in the data center. Generally speaking, IT engineers are generally only concerned with the operation of their equipment, while data center engineers focus on the operation of data center space and racks, as well as power and cooling equipment.

The person with data center management responsibility needs to think about the big picture and get the organization moving toward DCIM. This person is also responsible for all the information collected and fed into the system, including new assets entering the system, auditing bad assets, ensuring the system accurately captures all assigned measurements, performing updates to the DCIM system, and working with the DCIM vendor to resolve issues.

When all is said and done, the DCIM owned by the organization will be a powerful tool and effective cost-saving tool. Since the use of DCIM can display not only the real-time temperature of the data center, but also the real-time temperature of all rack IT equipment, the operation staff can increase the ambient temperature of the data center and reduce the power required to maintain cooling.

It was found that if the redundant power supply was interrupted, then the failure of the power load exceeding its capacity would cause unexpected outages. The organization's infrastructure capacity was created based on the information provided by the deployment of DCIM, and the operations staff knew exactly how much space and rack capacity there was, as well as the power and cooling capacity in real time. In addition, there was a need to significantly reduce costs because there was now a better asset inventory and maintenance costs could be reduced by removing unused equipment.

In order to realize all that DCIM can offer, it is critical that organizations do all the upfront planning and commit to the resources needed to keep data flowing. Without this commitment, your DCIM will become an expensive tool that contains stale and useless information.