It’s that time of year! As the new year begins, it’s time to step back from the daily grind and plan for 2012. One high-level challenge for data center managers is the use of floor space, and this new report from Gartner Research can help you meet that challenge.
Data center floor space is costly. When you have to upgrade or renovate a data center to meet growing IT needs, it is a very expensive proposition. Consequently, when you maximize the use of your existing data center floor space, you can avoid costly and time-consuming upgrades to your entire facility.
But what are the best practices? What are the most effective techniques to maximize your existing data center floor space? How do you measure and project your capacity? How much savings in floor space can you achieve?
A new report by Gartner addresses these questions. Based on their research, Gartner has developed four key recommendations for maximizing the use of your existing data center floor space. The report also describes the range of savings you can expect.
The complimentary report is available courtesy of nlyte Software, makers of Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software. Read the full report here.
Energy savings is just one of the benefits of better data center management — but it is the hot topic that can trigger C-level executives’ interest in data center operations. Learn about the broad business implications of data center infrastructure management in this paper by CITO Research. Read more.
By Carrie Schmelkin, TMCnet Web Editor
In the last 18 months, there has been more than $100 million invested in the data center infrastructure management (DCIM) market and nlyte Software is one company that is happy to say that it has been at the forefront of this nascent trend for the past eight years.
“The company was founded by two former data center professionals who were frustrated by the fact that they had to manage their data center on spreadsheets,” Todd Goldman, vice president of marketing and product management for nlyte, told TMCnet. “They said, ‘This is crazy. We have this million dollar data center that we are managing on spreadsheets.”
To address this frustration, the founders created nlyte, a pure-play software company that offers next generation tools and proven best practices in data center management. The company enables intelligent capacity planning resulting in the most efficient use of power, cooling and space through the optimal placement of data center assets.
One of the main issues nlyte tackles is predictive intelligence – determining where to put new servers and how to find the space and power in the data center to support the software. Continue reading »
By Nathan Weiss, IDMWORKS
Last week I was interviewed by a reporter from SearchITChannel.com about why IDMWORKS is having success with DCIM solutions in small to midsized data centers (20-100 cabinets). Although there are a multitude of benefits associated with implementing a DCIM solution, most (DCIM) companies are focusing solely on the enterprise market. Until recently that has been a major disadvantage for organizations in the small to mid size space that have some of the same needs, just on a smaller scale. DCIM solutions as a planning tool can provide a real world proof of concept that will give clients the confidence to implement and utilize a DCIM solution for their Data Center Infrastructure Management needs. SME and Enterprise clients should both benefit from the value these solutions can provide when integrated with migration or consolidation projects.
IDMWorks’ Data Center Migration team is certified by several of the industry leading DCIM solution providers. We have put our time and experience tested twist on how we deliver our services and how we believe DCIM solutions should be positioned in the data center space.
The Data Center Migration team specializes in migration planning. The evolution of our process has taken us from homegrown proprietary tools to the use of DCIM solutions during our engagements that provide strong benefits and features than we could not have offered years ago. Traditional methods would have the client going back to documenting their hardware and application inventories and circuit and connectivity in spreadsheets, Visio and CAD. The reality is once clients see the value that the DCIM solutions provide, and have worked with the product throughout a migration, the thought of going back to the old way of managing their the environment is not appealing. Additionally we do not utilize the typical auto-discovery features built into the DCIM solutions we work with as we have found there is much greater value derived in the manual process we deploy (basically the auto-mated processes give customers the bare minimum or less needed to have a successful engagement), and that most clients are reluctant to allow these applications to perform their auto-discovery functions on their networks (as to do so violates many tried and true network IT security principles).
No matter what the size of your organization is there are quantifiable benefits from utilizing DCIM solutions for planning, modeling, and scheduling an efficient equipment migration. Once the migration is complete, our team can install a fully populated DCIM solution for a client to use.
Data center operating costs have skyrocketed in the past years with a major contributor being the power bill. Gartner recently estimated that 12 percent of data center operating costs are spent on power, and this cost increases by 20 percent annually. In addition to the higher cost of operations, power poses other major challenges in terms of size, capacity and utilization constraints. The Uptime Institute recently reported that more than a third (36 percent) of data center facilities will run out of space, power and/or cooling in 2011 or 2012. Only a fraction of organizations have the resources to plan and build new data centers while most will have to resort to strategies such as consolidations, virtualizations, hardware upgrade and other means to meet growing demands and increase the lifeline of their data centers. In recent years, data center infrastructure management (DCIM) has become an essential solution for data centers in their effort to implement these strategies and help deal with their space, power and management challenges.
How DCIM supports the business
DCIM helps data centers identify and determine whether all the hardware assets are needed to meet the business objectives, while at the same time profiling assets to power usage, cooling requirements, applications running, utilization levels and so on. By providing full analysis of the data center, organizations can report back to management “what if” scenarios on how every move, add or change initiative will affect the status of the data center and properly forecast future improvements to the IT infrastructure.
DCIM enables organizations to systematically control and manage their data centers and help redirect wasted IT budget toward investments that support the core business objectives. Uncontrolled and unmanaged data centers end up wasting the IT budget on counter-productive, time-wasting activities – perpetual firefighting issues.
The ability to visualize, analyze and predict the performance of the data center is among the strongest features of DCIM. This predictive analysis enables the data center operator to examine various and competing concepts before committing to any changes. Moreover, if DCIM is used to analyze the present status and predict the performance of any future changes, then a focus on cooling should be at the epicenter of these efforts.
Sources:
Gartner, The Benefits of CFD Analysis in Designing and Running Modern Data Centers, 1 March 2011.
Information Week, Data Centers Face Growth Challenges, 20 March 2011.
Excerpt from The DCIM Advisory feature article by Kamran Fouladi and Soheil “Sam” Negahbani, Energex Technologies. Check back later for more on this feature.
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