The data center infrastructure management (DCIM) tools of today are not just green initiatives like DCIM of yore. DCIM today includes not just energy management, but also physical infrastructure management, facilities management and systems management wrapped into a single, integrated product.

“DCIM today is managing all IT assets that are within the datacenter. IT assets sit at the heart of the datacenter, and to keep the operations up and running, it is imperative that these assets are managed from the root level,” said Suvish Viswanathan, senior analyst at ManageEngine (News - Alert), in an interview this week with IT Briefcase.

“A holistic solution that can bring real-time visibility into systems management, physical infrastructure and facilities management from a single console is required,” he told IT Briefcase. “Today, the need for such a solution has risen in the market. Recent high-profile datacenter outages have occurred due to a lack of visibility; nobody wants to be in the same position.”

ManageEngine, a division of Zoho (News - Alert) Corporation, has addressed the need for holistic DCIM with its IT360 solution. IT360 combines virtual and physical server and network monitoring, end user experience and application performance management, CMDB 7 IT asset management, and now multivendor storage area network (SAN) and network-attached-storage (NAS) management.

This week, ManageEngine announced that the latest version of IT360 now supports storage monitoring. This includes storage arrays, fabric switches, tape libraries, host servers and host bus adapter cards.

“The solution also performs auto-discovery of storage devices from multiple vendors based on vendor-specific algorithms as well as SNMP, CLI and SNIA SMI-S,” noted Laura Stotler in MSPNews. “The newest version also enables customers to perform fault management activities by capturing sensor faults from IT360's unified console. These may include power supply, temperature, fan, battery and status change notifications.”

For social media firms such as Facebook, or telecoms like Verizon (News - Alert), the datacenter serves more like a factory generating something that is sold, noted ManageEngine’s Viswanathan. But a business angle can be incorporated into the DCIM solution by integrating a proper knowledge base into the solution, serving other segments of the market that use the datacenter to support their core business processes.

That’s where holistic DCIM products such as IT360 come in.

“IT360 manages the entire IT division with an ITIL twist. We included a pre-integrated CMDB in the product,” he noted. “This helps organizations to maintain a single database for all IT assets, assets within the datacenter and also the ones that reside outside the datacenter.”

He added that capacity planning is also available with ManageEngine’s solution. “The major advantage with IT360 is the ability to integrate with other ManageEngine solutions. This makes the product completely flexible.”

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