Our company, Graphical Networks, has been in the data center sphere for many years and there’s one constant: technology, and how we manage it, is constantly evolving. To keep up, IT and network engineers need to be able to get information, and visualize, the different environments they manage. Good DCIM software needs to evolve alongside the constantly evolving tech landscape to help users stay ahead of the curve.
New Tech, New Demands
Back when VMWare first exploded, it gained lots of buzz traction for its ability to let businesses run multiple application and operating system workloads on one server. Virtualization changed the way IT ran server workloads by distributing the work of a given virtual server across multiple physical hosts. More and more, IT information today lives in virtual environments and, as a result, IT managers need a way to document and visualize all of this information.
From Amazon AWS to Microsoft Azure, there are countless providers that offer Cloud computing. According to Wikipedia: “Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage and computing power, without direct active management by the user. The term is generally used to describe data centers available to many users over the Internet.” As Cloud computing becomes more and more ubiquitous, it’s essential that it can be both documented and visualized.
Today’s businesses are adopting a hybrid IT infrastructure which encompasses the traditional physical data centers as well as the public Cloud — such as AWS or Azure. There’s also the private Cloud, hybrid Cloud (combination or public and private Cloud), and public cloud companies offering private Cloud, like Azure VMWare Services.
Needless to say, trying to bridge the gap and manage all the different pieces gets tough.
DCIM Bridges Gaps
With so many new technologies rolling out, how can you stay current while also focusing on your data center assets and equipment? Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software such as netTerrain gives organizations a single-pane-of-glass view of their entire infrastructure — facilities, IT, networks, virtual and public cloud. DCIM also needs to start visualizing and offering actionable data from Cloud providers.
What do I mean? Let’s use our software, netTerrain DCIM, as an example. In netTerrain, the Collector tool
(which houses netTerrain’s API connectors to VMWare, VCenter, VMWare NSX-T, AWS, Microsoft Azure) is easy to use. It has certain settings that need to be configured along with your user credentials. Once this is done, you just click on scan and you can see your cloud infrastructure: netTerrain discovers it in real-time and maps the infrastructure and applications with user friendly web diagrams that can be accessed by your IT staff. You get accurate views of your entire IT infrastructure — both the traditional physical data center space and the Cloud.
Here at Graphical Networks, we use netTerrain software to monitor and manage our Cloud Computing Infrastructure (and we also use it to manage our traditional rack and stack equipment): netTerrain makes it easy to graphically view our instances on Azure and AWS and monitor them on our tv screen in the office.
In sum, to capture today’s ever evolving hybrid IT infrastructures, DCIM vendors must adopt and also provide insights and visibilities of Cloud computing resources, along with their on-premises IT assets. Before you buy DCIM, check with your vendor to see how you can test a connector to your public cloud provider, like AWS and Azure….DCIM that can adopt to your myriad environments is how you can achieve the “single-pane-of-glass” DCIM that everyone wants (click here to read more about DCIM and the idea of the single-pane-of-glass).