The impact of the data center has become so pervasive throughout an enterprise that it is closely scrutinized not only by senior management, but also by watchdog and government regulatory agencies. Senior management wants to know that the data center is being run efficiently and government agencies are concerned with the environmental impact of the data center. Data center infrastructure management (DCIM) enables the data center to be seen as a single system, with each of the components identified and understood. The efficiency of each component is made visible and can be optimized on a continuing basis as load factors and environmental variables change.
Due to product life cycles, financial models, optimizations, and evolution, a conservative estimate says that more than one quarter of all data center assets should be changed every year. For a data center with 250 racks of equipment, that equates to more than a dozen changes every day of the year. Each of these changes can be viewed as a project. In such an environment, manual processes or documentation are overwhelmed. DCIM is really the only tool that can manage such massive change.
Relating to the cloud
There are two types of clouds: public clouds and private clouds. Public clouds are businesses in themselves, run by major companies such as Google, Microsoft, or Amazon. Thousands, or even millions, of people or organizations can store their information on these clouds. Public clouds offer self-service, quick provisioning, and accounting, along with world class security and guaranteed uptime. To operate on this scale, public clouds absolutely must use some form of DCIM to responsively manage assets and dynamically tune their systems to variations in supply and demand. Without DCIM, public clouds can’t deliver the level of service that users have come to expect.
Private clouds are basically traditional data centers that have been transformed using the principles pioneered by the public clouds. DCIM solutions are proving to be significant enabling technologies for this IT infrastructure re engineering. DCIM is all about enabling the data center to be responsive and aligned to the business.