Data centers today are constantly growing and evolving — without the right tools (and team), it can be all but impossible to gain control over an ecosystem that’s in a constant state of flux.
Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) solutions help data center managers regain control over issues that may be causing you, and/or your management, headaches.
In this blog, we’ll look at four key ways in which DCIM can really help data center managers take back control:
1. DCIM Helps You Control Space and Weight Capacity
Are you sick of playing ‘eenie, minie, moe’ every time you have to lay down a new server? How are you keeping track of your racks’ space and weight availability? Running out of space? To ensure you have adequate availability, data center capacity planning is a big part of the “why” for having a DCIM solution like netTerrain DCIM.
DCIM should make it easy to track how much rack space availability you have in each rack and each row. In addition to managing space, don’t forget being able to measure the weight of all of your equipment in each rack!
Good DCIM software arms you with visual cues of your space and weight availability, dashboard capacity reports to help you manage your assets, inventory, and plan for future growth of your space.
Rack Elevation in netTerrain DCIM
2. DCIM Helps You Control Power
Tired of dealing with too much power consumption? Are cooling costs going up too much? Are you tasked with doing something about it, but you just don’t have the insights you really need to take action? What can help you take back control of your power and cooling costs? DCIM to the rescue…
DCIM is used by many organizations to lower power usage effectiveness ratios (PUE): it’s so effective that U.S. federal government data centers are under a mandate to have DCIM installed to control rising energy costs. With our DCIM software netTerrain’s environmental monitoring module, for example, our customers have saved up to 30% on data center energy expenditures.
Environmental Monitoring Dashboard in netTerrain DCIM
How else can managing power solve your data center headaches? For one, you should be able to track on a per rack basis, how much power is being consumed, either by manufacturer name plate power, or real-time power monitoring. This helps you manage power capacity, find underutilized servers (which take up valuable rack space and cooling), oversubscribe rack density by adding more servers to the racks (while not sacrificing power capacity limits), and it helps you reduce the number of racks you’ve got to purchase and maintain.
3. DCIM Helps You Control Downtime
While DCIM isn’t exactly a “get out of jail free” card that lets you escape downtime altogether, it does help keep downtime from spiraling out of control. Each minute of downtime is costly: according to Gartner, the average cost of downtime is $5,600 per minute — not to mention the loss of productivity and reputation that are also casualties when something goes down.
By having a system in place that centralizes all of your information, you can quickly find information in seconds to help find and resolve an issue quickly. It is even faster by making sure your DCIM is in your change management process, to ensure the data you see are up to date, or also by doing a data import and synching to another data source, like ServiceNow, or Solarwinds, and always be on the know.
Additionally, netTerrain’s environmental monitoring module (which is included for free with netTerain DCIM) gives you key server health insights.
4. DCIM Helps You Control Costs
Though this item really is the natural conclusion of the three points we discussed above, it still deserves its own heading!
If you are, like most data center managers today, fielding ever-rising costs — from sky high energy costs to spending too much on equipment to prolonged downtime, DCIM helps you lasso in the spending and keep your footprint right-sized.
To sum up, if you’re sick of trying to keep growth, space, and capacity right-sized while ensuring availability and avoiding downtime — without the proper tools — a good DCIM solution can be a lifesaver (and, in this blog, we didn’t even touch upon how DCIM can help you untangle your cabling spaghetti…read more about that here).
Because not all DCIM software is built equal, be sure to check out our mostly vendor-agnostic guide on finding a good DCIM solution or get a free trial of our solution, netTerrain DCIM, by clicking here.