A DCIM solution provides real-time information and intelligent data center infrastructure performance insights. Using this information, organizations can improve operations and reduce costs.
In the Design phase, a data center infrastructure management tool provides device-level power and cooling data to help determine the best placement of equipment. It helps avoid over-provisioning, which wastes money.
Real-Time Visibility
A data center is a complex environment that requires continuous monitoring to ensure everything works correctly. If a task slips through the cracks, it can impact performance and lead to costly downtime.
Using data center infrastructure management (DCIM) tools allows data center managers to see exactly what equipment is where and how it performs in real-time. This is essential for data center teams, who need accurate inventory reporting and power management capabilities to minimize energy consumption.
The advanced modeling and visibility features in data center infrastructure management also help to prevent unplanned outages. With real-time data, they can track power usage and dependencies between devices to make informed decisions and predict problems before they occur.
In addition, the monitoring and alerting capabilities in data center infrastructure management help data centers avoid downtime by reducing the time it takes for IT staff to identify issues. This enables them to take proactive measures to address them before they cause a significant outage and frees up skilled personnel.
Increased Efficiency
A well-thought-out data center infrastructure management system enables facility managers to monitor all the critical equipment that makes up a data center from a single dashboard. This allows for proactively identifying problems and alerts, improving predictive maintenance, energy usage optimization, and capacity planning.
The ability to pinpoint issues causing environmental threats (such as temperature fluctuations) and resolve them promptly can also significantly reduce the risk of costly downtime.
As a result, data centers can be more efficiently managed, which leads to significant energy savings. For example, through real-time insights, data centers can maximize the use of power distribution units and cooling systems, which in turn reduces energy costs. This is also true of the hardware health monitoring capabilities of a next-generation DCIM system, which can help optimize utilization and postpone the need for replacements. This reduces the overall cost of ownership. A correctly implemented DCIM system can even reduce costs by enabling a data center to qualify for a lower utility rate.
Reduced Downtime
The centralized visibility offered by data center infrastructure management solutions allows data center operators to coordinate better and manage workflows, resulting in reduced downtime. The information gathered by data center infrastructure management systems also empowers them to identify potential problems before they escalate, thus minimizing loss of uptime.
This can be achieved by tracking IT equipment (servers, network switches, and storage), infrastructure components like cooling systems and power distribution units, and energy metrics. Data center infrastructure management enables managers to track data at the device, rack, zone, and data center levels. It also allows them to spot issues like over-cooling or excess power consumption that lead to downtime.
Data center infrastructure management can also help reduce downtime by facilitating hardware optimization, which is critical for machine learning and AI applications that consume large amounts of computing power and must be continuously optimized for peak performance. Data center infrastructure management solutions can also help IT administrators facilitate changes to the data center, including new application rollouts. This is particularly important because a lack of standard processes can lead to operator errors that account for 80% of downtime in data centers.
Improved Collaboration
A data center infrastructure management solution can eliminate the need for team members to be on-site whenever they need to identify an asset’s status or assess power or network connections. This reduces wasteful time and increases productivity.
In addition, a data center infrastructure management system can also improve communication between IT and facilities management by combining information from multiple company divisions. This eliminates siloed data and helps ensure critical responsibilities don’t slip through the cracks.
Whether your organization is a colocation provider, managed services provider, or application cloud-based service provider, accurate real-time infrastructure visibility is crucial. With the help of a data center infrastructure management solution, you can easily understand asset details and physical power and network connections to enable highly accurate capacity planning at the device, rack, or zone level. This allows for faster, more efficient service provisioning and ensures SLA compliance. The data center infrastructure management tool can also identify and free up stranded capacity for future deployments. This can result in significant cost savings.