On the seventh and last stop in a seminar series, Server Technology (News - Alert), RF Code and Nlyte Software joined together at The Players club in New York City recently to discuss the state of the data center industry, optimization best practices and how to overcome some of the biggest barriers data center managers are seeing today.
Data center infrastructure management (DCIM) was a big topic of discussion at the event. Drivers for DCIM include power savings, green IT, regulations, technology refresh and upgrades, asset migrations, capacity planning, improving operational excellence, competitive positioning and cost. The three companies all play a role in enabling DCIM and power management – Mike Harris, vice president of marketing and data center strategy at Nlyte Software, explained that DCIM should be something more than just a sit-and-wait technology for business.
“DCIM brings back discipline. Structure. It is enabling technology that pulls in power, asset knowledge and environmental monitoring and does it on top of a structure that is well-documented and fully articulated,” Harris said at the event. “A lot of people say, ‘I didn’t realize what I was getting, but how did I live without this? I didn’t realize what I was missing until I had it.’”
However, some barriers to adopting DCIM include cost, preference for internal tools, maintaining asset accuracy, deciding what budgets are responsible for DCIM, and ROI that is hard to prove and quantify.
As Calvin Nicholson, senior director of software and firmware development at Server Technology pointed out at the event, you can’t manage what you’re not monitoring. “A lot of companies feel like they’re out of power, but they’re not monitoring and measuring their IT load to see what’s available and what’s actually being used,” he said – a trend known as stranded capacity.
The three companies integrate their solutions together to offer clients the most efficient solutions to reach data center operational excellence. The goal of the seminar series was to highlight the DCIM, monitoring, control, open APIs and interoperability between the companies and discuss how big companies have utilized these joint solutions.
For example, a user can take Server Technology’s Sentry Power Manager (SPM) and cabinet power distribution units (PDUs) and integrate them with RF Code’s wire-free system of sensor devices and software for real-time, wire-free power and environmental reporting. The integrated solution has the capability of transmitting critical environmental data over a flexible, cost-effective and wire-free infrastructure that can provide better management and control of power and operational costs.
Presentations throughout the event highlighted how integrated solutions like these improve the speed of enhanced performance, business benefits that provide ROI and a reduced total cost of ownership in the data center.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson