Asset Management on Steroids
Assets exist in all types of data centres:
Data Centre Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software is a class of software that gives data centre operators the ability to run efficient data centre operations and improve data centre infrastructure planning and design. It typically replaces Excel®, Visio®, and home-grown databases. DCIM software can bridge information across organizational domains—Data Centre Ops, Facilities, and IT—to maximize utilization of data centre resources.
Capacity Management is a process that enables a Data Centre Manager to measure the consumption of resources and establish remaining infrastructure capacity availability while managing risk.
Managing Data Centre Operations
In recent years, data centre infrastructure has become significantly more reliable and management practices have improved, so it would be fair to expect that the number of reported downtime incidents is decreasing. But this is not the case.
According to a 2018 survey by Uptime Institute, 31% of respondents experienced a downtime incident or severe degradation in the last year and 48% reported at least one outage at their site or at a service provider in the last three years.
Managing Data Centre Operations
Good network documentation practices improve uptime and increase the speed at which you can deploy equipment. Plus, if there is an issue, you can quickly trace cables via your documentation to determine the root cause rather than having to manually trace cables. Without proper documentation, you risk mismanagement of resources, ineffective use of capacity, inability to move or install equipment, unsafe operating environments, and increased capital expenditures for new cabling and hardware.
Managing Data Centre Operations
Sunbird DCIM software provides Data Centre operations managers with the ability to identify, locate, visualize, and manage all physical Data Centre assets, quickly provision new equipment, and confidently plan capacity for future growth. Sunbird DCIM software also helps control energy costs, improve Data Centre design, and increase operational efficiency.
As colocation environments grow increasingly dense and complex, you need to accurately inventory and track individual physical port types residing on every device to make the most informed decisions to improve planning for new equipment and services and aid in maintaining and troubleshooting colocation infrastructure.
“A lot of times I’m in a meeting and there’s a project coming up and we’re going to deploy some new equipment and we want to know what we have for connectivity,” said Tom Wysocki, Data Center Manager, KPMG. “What I’m able to do is bring up a visual of that switch and very quickly I can highlight what’s connected and what’s not connected. So if we’re in a project and I know there’s going to be ten servers and I’m going to need two connections per server, I can see I’ve got plenty of ports available and even assign those out now to the network team or the project leader and say, ‘These are the ports we’ll be utilizing,’ so they can go ahead and start getting them configured. We can start pre-cabling ahead of time and labeling and really move ahead on that project.
