Data Center Outages: First Good News Then Expensive News
By Fred Koh - June 14, 2021New research from the Uptime Institute is in…when it comes to the quantity of data center outages in the year 2020, there weren’t any increases. That’s right: less data center outages. In fact, despite the impact of COVID-19, Uptime’s research shows that, on the individual facility level, there are less outages. Cheers: good news! The…
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IT’s Upcoming Silver Tsunami: DCIM Can Help
By Fred Koh - June 1, 2021The data center workforce that will be needed in the not-so-far future is predicted to grow from 2 million workers in 2019 to 2.3 million workers in 2025. As the baby boomer generation continues to work beyond what used to be the average age of retirement, there’s a big question mark hovering above multiple industries…
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Do You Really Need Rack Diagrams?
By Fred Koh - May 28, 2021Here at Graphical Networks, we make IT documentation software called netTerrain. netTerrain comes in two main flavors — Logical and DCIM (as well as an add-on outside plant network module). As folks come to us looking for IT documentation software, we’re often asked, “hey, what’s the major difference between your Logical and DCIM solutions?” The…
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How to Define DCIM in 2021?
By Fred Koh - May 14, 2021From its inception about 20 years ago to now, Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) has evolved a great deal. The earliest definition of DCIM was that it was a part of building information software (BIM) intended to assist facility managers in creating digital, schematic diagrams. Today, DCIM is described as a solution that helps IT…
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Crash Course: Manage Your Power with DCIM
By Fred Koh - April 2, 2021Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM): how do you, and your team, define DCIM? I ask because DCIM isn’t defined by a rigid list of capabilities; what DCIM means depends on who needs it (to read more about “defining DCIM”, click here). If I had to summarize what DCIM is, however, I would define it by…
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Need DCIM? Keep it Simple
By Fred Koh - March 30, 2021What makes a data center infrastructure management solution (DCIM) vendor rank highly in those various top ten lists out there? Well, as I’ve discussed previously, there are numerous factors, such as how scalable or supported a solution is. Ultimately, though, and coming from my perspective as co-founder of a company that makes and sells the…
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What is “Easy DCIM”?
By Fred Koh - March 22, 2021‘Usability’: it’s one word that means a whole lot, right? Before you purchase any new enterprise-grade software, your IT team probably wants to know: how’s the usability, or, in other words, how easy is it for your organization’s users to use a new application to create and foster adopt-ability for a new software program such…
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Need DCIM? Why The Price Isn’t Always Right
By Fred Koh - March 18, 2021We’ve been in the IT documentation and visualization business for so long that I remember a time before Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) was even coined: we were in the network and data center rack and cabling documentation business back in the early 2000’s and I remember sitting down with our Marketing Director who said,…
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Want to Visualize Your AWS Infrastructure?
By Jason Sherman - February 23, 2021Use Amazon Web Services (AWS)? The AWS interface is great: you can service anywhere in the world and more. It’s not, however, without its limitations. What’s missing? What if you want to view relationships between things (such as backups, volumes, and snapshots) in a documented view of information and data? This helps you to better…
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Small Business Friendly DCIM?
By Jason Sherman - February 19, 2021If you take a gander at our customer list, you’ll probably notice that many numerous large companies use netTerrain (and that is, by no means, our complete customer list). We are not, however, a company that just offers software for large companies: we have customers from small to large. Our customers range from the one…
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DCIM Pricing: Should You Pay by Racks or Objects?
By Jason Sherman - February 4, 2021Need DCIM software? Are you currently looking at various vendors, capabilities, and options? Wondering what’s better…pricing DCIM software by rack or object? I’ll make this one easy for you: pricing by objects…hands down! Why is that? Pricing DCIM by objects gives you far greater control over your data center and all your network documentation and…
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Need to Manage Remote Sites? DCIM Helps
By Jason Sherman - January 21, 2021Recently, a prospective customer told me that a key reason behind their interest in netTerrain DCIM is the need to manage remote sites…I thought, “I’m sure I can send him a blog about that since netTerrain DCIM helps our customers manage remote sites all the time”. Nope: I realized we didn’t have a blog detailing…
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