24th October 2013

Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) means many things to many people, depending on their short-term and long-range goals for the data center. For some, the immediate priority is reducing energy consumption and costs, contributing to the elimination of OPEX. For others, it’s getting a better handle on space so they can optimize every square foot of their existing footprint, an important part of their strategy for reducing CAPEX. For still others, it’s getting control over their IT asset inventory –­ what they have and where it is on the floor. Here, data center owners and operators around the world agree on a core tenant of IT asset management:

Any DCIM solution worth its salt has to have a strong asset tracking and location capability that can find, identify, and confirm the location of every asset on the floor.

This is where the DCIM partnership of iTRACS and RF Code shines.

You can’t manage what you can’t find.

It may not be as bad as worrying about the whereabouts of a teenager at night, but tracking down your servers and other IT assets is vital for data centers seeking firm control over their asset portfolio. It reduces time spent on asset management by your IT staff, accelerates audits, helps with lease management, and streamlines tech refresh and other data center initiatives.

So let me ask you this:Do you know where all of your servers are located, what they are doing, and why they are there?  And HOW do you know that you, indeed, know?

If you can’t answer both of these questions with confidence, you need a joint DCIM solution from iTRACS and RF Code. Let me explain …

There are two types of assets on the floor that commonly go undetected and/or unauthorized, jeopardizing the efficiency and well-being of your operation:

1. Misplaced Assets. These are older “forgotten” assets sitting in your racks without your knowledge or control (out of your line of sight). You don’t even know they are still hanging around. Perhaps the Line of Business removed its applications and left the physical servers to sit there uselessly, forgotten. Or the boxes’ leases expired but no one did anything about it. In any event, these assets are the “lost children” of the IT portfolio. And if you don’t asset-tag them, they may sit on your racks, unseen, needlessly consuming power and space, forever.
2. Misinstalled Assets. These are assets that are installed in the wrong location but you may not know it until it’s too late and your IT services are negatively impacted! This often occurs in critical facilities where servers must be deployed or relocated fast, outside the normal working practices. In situations like this, assets can be inadvertantly misinstalled in the wrong racks. But there’s no way for you to KNOW that a mistake has been made unless you have an asset tracking solution like iTRACS with RF Code. Without asset tracking, you may remain in the dark about these assets until it’s too late and the complaints about poor or nonexistent service roll in. Not a pleasant place to find yourself.

Unauthorized assets can wreak havoc on your floor …

These problem assets can:

• Consume power without delivering quantifiable value back to the Business –­ under-utilized or literally unused
• Take up valuable rack space for no purpose
• Draw in network services for no purpose
• Delay time-to-service (misinstalled servers), costing the Business in lost transactions, customer goodwill, revenue, and profitability
• Potentially jeopardize availability (misinstalled assets), creating technical issues that can reverberate across the physical ecosystem
• Waste money – both OPEX and CAPEX

Fortunately, there is an answer – DCIM featuring the iTRACS Converged Physical Infrastructure Management® (CPIM®) software suite with RF Code’s real-time asset data inside.

Use DCIM to run a more efficient data center operation with tighter reins over your asset portfolio

Working together in a powerful DCIM partnership, iTRACS and RF Code can help make your rogue assets go away. Integration with RF Code lets iTRACS CPIM® users collect, manage, and analyze asset location information captured directly from RF Code’s RFID sensors. RF Code’s real-time asset location data – analyzed and visualized in iTRACS’ award-winning DCIM management platform – lets users confirm the location of every asset in their portfolio, manage physical moves/adds/changes with 100% confidence, and conduct other asset management tasks over the lifecycle of their equipment. The sensors cannot lie. So rogue assets can no longer hide.

Source:rfcode.com

The post DCIM Solutions: Do You Know Where Your Servers Are? appeared first on International Finance.

23rd july 2013

Data isn’t just big; it’s massive.  With each passing minute, a staggering 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube.  Google receives over 2,000,000 search queries.  Email users send over 200,000,000 messages.  Apple receives 47,000 app downloads.  Get the picture?  Clearly the omnipresent “big data” is quickly manifesting itself into “massive data.”

According to 451, “DCIM, or Data Center Infrastructure Management, is one of the most disruptive technologies this year.   In 2012, the DCIM market generated around $429M in revenue and had record demand in the first quarter of 2013.”  Furthermore, DCIM sales are expected to grow 42% to reach $1.8B in aggregate revenue by 2013.  As a result of the increasing demand for DCIM to manage Big Data, it’s clear that what once was a trend for automation in the datacenter has now become a need that will only grow in the coming years.

But with growth comes confusion.  Compounding the issue, DCIM vendors and conflicting information are scattered across the web.  With all the marketing hype about “solutions,” here are the facts to help break this down for you:

DCIM promises: capacity planning, energy efficiency, airflow optimization, asset management, and thermal mapping.  It offers to control and automate your data ecosystem, granting you governance and operational efficiency.  But does it really?  Without real-time information, you only know what DID happen and not what IS happening in the datacenter.

The ability to monitor your environmental conditions is vital, but they will not be accurate in the absence of real-time monitoring.  Knowing the location of a specific rack server is crucial for operational planning and efficiency, but if you do not have these items tagged, then your only alternative is to walk throughout the datacenter in search of the rack.  Without real-time updates, it becomes nearly impossible to manage critical events in the datacenter.  Leaks must be detected, heat must be managed, and airflow must be regulated.  In the event of a threat to an unplanned outage, an IT manager would need to react to a potential disaster right away.  However, without timely reporting, they could risk IT equipment failure costs that would average $5,600 per minute and $505,500 per event!

Think about it this way: DCIM that’s not in real-time is like buying a brand new Ferrari that you can’t fill up with gas.  Despite its sleek appearance, you won’t be taking full advantage of accelerating that V12 engine if your shiny new car sits motionless.  Similarly, DCIM is trendy and attractive to incorporate in your datacenter, but it’s simply not complete without real-time asset tracking and environmental monitoring.  Without our RF Code real-time solution, DCIM is really only DCI: Datacenter Infrastructure, lacking in Management.  This is why we “turbo-charge” your datacenter for optimization.  We put the “M” in “DCIM.”

Source: www.rfcode.com

The post The DCIM Necessity : When Big Data Becomes Massive Data appeared first on International Finance.