Author
Casey Adams
It happens to all of us—life gets busy and we lose touch with friends. The occasional phone call and text is barely enough to find out about their lives and families. We resort to following them through social media, where we see that they take great vacations, move to a new house or change jobs. Even though you can’t make it to the reunion, you can see who was there and who ended up embarrassing themselves thoroughly while staying out late.
What if you could ‘friend request’ your data center? What if you were able to look at all of your floor-mounted assets the same way as going through a friend’s images and posts to find out what they are doing?
The role of data center infrastructure management (DCIM) is one that enables us to see what is happening in our data centers, in different graphical representations to help understand what the interactions are between all of the different utilities and services in your building. This enables the owner, the operator and the customer to make informed decisions on what their next steps should be for growth, recovery and asset management of the data center.
For example, you can see that you have a lease on some servers that are essentially “on vacation” because they are being underutilized. This can tell you whether you can virtualize the function on those machines and consolidate onto fewer chassis or return the unused equipment for a cost savings.
What about identifying energy hogs impacting your PUE (power usage effectiveness)? Similar to the friend that posts pictures of every meal or blogs their every thought, you can identify and remediate the situation before it becomes an overwhelming issue.
What good is seeing a single snap shot of your power usage if you don’t know the growth rate? Or how many fiber ports are available if you need copper ports? Or where electrical circuits run without knowing that they are already fully utilized?
Next time you log into your social media of choice, think about what it would be like to see your friend - the data center - posting updates about what it is up to and how it is performing.
Do you use DCIM in your data center yet? Would you like to send it a friend request?
