Schneider Electric integrates StruxureWare™ DCIM solution with HP ITSM

“Today’s data centre managers are increasingly challenged by enduring siloes between IT and facilities that lead to a breakdown in communication, making it difficult to take the first steps towards streamlined operations, improved efficiency and reduced costs,” says Soeren Jensen, Vice President, Enterprise Management and Software, Schneider Electric. “Through this collaboration with HP to provide a holistic approach to managing IT business process assets and workloads, we are bridging the gap between IT and facilities and arming IT service providers with the data and insight they need to run their facility at an optimal level.”

Typically, DCIM and ITSM platforms operate in isolation from each other, with data centre managers utilising different teams and resources to manage change within and between each domain, increasing the possibility for resource conflicts which can be time consuming and costly. Through the integration of Schneider Electric’s StruxureWare for Data Centers suite with HP’s UCMDB, communication and asset data reconciliation between the solutions platforms for DCIM and ITSM will be enabled. This allows data centre managers to manage both IT services and physical infrastructure within the data centre in a holistic, integrated way.

Access to HP's "Single Instance of Truth" provides enhanced visibility into asset performance and lifecycle – based on warranty, lease or other ownership parameters – across all HP IT management platforms while inter-platform asset and event change reporting can also alert data centre operators to potential asset conflicts, such as limitations on infrastructure or service policy violations. Combined, the capability to obtain this level of detail regarding asset performance provides operators with an improved understanding of impact scenarios at the infrastructure, virtual machine, and customer level.

Additionally, the linkage of IT services and processes to physical assets as well as power and cooling requirements enables data centre operators to directly associate IT with power consumption. This allows for the measurement of workload-to-watts equivalency, enabling data centre managers to capture the true total cost of operation for end user services.

“Operating DCIM and ITSM platforms independently of one another is not only costly and time consuming, but can make it difficult for data center operators to manage IT and facility functions smoothly and efficiently,” says Rick Einhorn, VP, Worldwide Data Centre Consulting, HP. “HP's Universal Configuration Management Database will help customers capitalise on Schneider Electric’s DCIM solution, StruxureWare for Data Centers, by enabling enhanced communication with ITSM for more holistic and integrated management of data centre assets.”