Jan

To Live Well With Data Center Infrastructure Management

The question that arises in the light of detailed analysis of DCIM-making – how such systems can bring the most benefit to companies? DCIM first to the West and India have expressed interest in operators of commercial data centers. And it continues to rise, especially in view of the changing needs of the market. Large companies are gradually increasing confidence in the colocation-providers, they are increasingly willing to place their servers, business applications, critical data, and etc on leased sites.

The customers and their requirements are different, sometimes conflicting. The task of the operator of the data center – to comply with the technical conditions of use of heterogeneous hardware, the composition of which also may vary. DCIM sharpens its focus on asset management, documentation, audits. On the one hand, cloud virtualization allows flexibility to reallocate the load on computing resources. On the other – need DCIM operative management system for engineering infrastructure.

If we talk about the corporate segment, the most interested in the DCIM are IT-oriented companies, such as telecom operators and large banks. Usually they are geographically dispersed organizations that have large-scale IT infrastructure, combines several or even dozens of data centers. Adding to this, the accumulated or had inherited after the merger / acquisitions problem. In such a situation, DCIM allows you to control the cost of ownership and significantly reduce the risks when making changes to the IT infrastructure, and this applies to both, the daily operation and planning of potential investments.

Today, our industry is moving towards cloud data centers, implying that the IT resources are provided as a service and infrastructure load change very rapidly. While the number of such data centers in India is small, but this trend will soon become universal. Creating a DCIM-system, takes you to the dynamic load balancing.

So, geographically dispersed companies need to conserve energy on priority. It can control the load in the network data center. There are regions where electricity is cheaper, there are day and night rates, and taking into account the time zone difference, could carry the most energy-intensive load to other data centers. These savings can be quite substantial.

It is necessary to say a few words about the cost of the DCIM-making and its payback period. If the company is planning to purchase a license for the core modules and resource management changes, implement basic integration with external systems of DCIM, the same Configuration Management Database. To fill the database, it is necessary to examine the data center in detail, create and implement regulations, to train staff, develop reports, etc.

Note that the tools employed depends on the objectives and conditions of a specific project: For someone, to have the cable magazines could be more important, the other – the power supply circuit; some have a plurality of primary systems that can serve as sources of data for DCIM, others almost enter all the information manually. No single recipe, but we have a great instrumental and technical base and can choose the most appropriate means.

Assessing the situation in the data center, we are working with the company that defines its segment, where the use of DCIM give the most benefits. For a realistic assessment of this effect, as well as the convenience of the proposed tools we can create a pilot zone. Its deployment goes from 1 to 3 months, 3 to 6 months and still need to assess all the possibilities of integrated data center management.

Summarizing, we note another trend is gaining popularity in the corporate world. Virtually all, regardless of which sector of market they belong to, have already switched to the cloud computing architecture, started (or are about to start) to implement virtual environments. Therefore, companies today should consider the use of management tools for engineering as a part of the data center as they relate to the management of virtual computing environment.