The recent pandemic has profoundly disrupted nearly all facets of everyday life: its impact on data center managers and teams has meant the need to remotely manage assets and power. Managing multiple sites with unique power systems is hard during a normal year — during a pandemic…when you’re working with a reduced team for a variety of reasons… it’s next to impossible.
How can you reset a server when you are at home, 20 miles away from the data center?
Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software, such as netTerrain DCIM , helps teams tackle power issues remotely. netTerrain DCIM’s environmental monitoring is included, right out-of-the-box, and is designed to cut out unnecessary trips to the field, save time and money, lower data center PUE, boost uptime, and reduce mean-time-to-repair.
With netTerrain DCIM, for example, it’s easy to remotely control power: you can switch your devices on and off and power cycle them — there’s no need to have an onsite staff to handle this, especially with the pandemic and most everyone working remotely. netTerrain’s power monitoring also helps you prevent power issues that require hands-on work. If an outage does occur, you can use netTerrain to pinpoint the exact location and see everything that is impacted — which saves on time, manpower, and reduces downtime.
In addition to monitoring and managing your power, you can also track in netTerrain DCIM. With its Server Health Monitoring and Utilization, you can track down to the sub-components, and data on your server’s utilization, such as CPU, disk and Memory. Get key insights on server health and stay on top of issues (before they become problems). When you are able to stay on top of server health, you can make necessary changes before failures occur, all within netTerrain DCIM’s Power Dashboards.
Power Dashboard in netTerrain DCIM
To help your team increase productivity while working remotely, you can grant them access to your DCIM solution to access information about your data center. In a solution like netTerrain DCIM, all of the data is stored in a centralized repository which gives your staff the power to collaborate, make comments, view the physical data center diagrams, view dashboards and reports, and search capabilities to find a device or connection in seconds (all of which is especially important for remote workers).
Data? Your data can be obtained, in real-time, via DCIM connector tools (in netTerrain DCIM’s case, it is through the netTerrain Collector — which houses the network discovery and connectors to third party applications) so your staff does not have to be onsite to track every asset or connection manually. With netTerrain’s SNMP discovery with CDP and LLDP, WMI, and NMAP, you can see how your data center assets and connections are connected. You can set up a polling service to see if a device is up or down, see when the last time a device or connection was last updated, to ensure that the diagrams you are viewing are reliable and up-to-date.
With a DCIM solution in place, working remotely can be done utilizing its many features, like turning on/off servers, reboots, viewing your servers health, managing the assets in your data center through real-time discovery or connections to existing applications (such as ServiceNow, Solarwinds Orion, CA Spectrum), and managing/viewing how all of the data center assets are connected.