Managing assets with automated monitoring

As you connect more hardware, monitoring operational aspects of your servers and switches, cooling and power equipment and any other linked IT hardware becomes harder. DC operators face the challenge of maintaining extremely high levels of availability, whilst significantly improving efficiencies and lowering costs. DCIM (Data Centre Infrastructure Management) plays a vital role in this. One key element of DCIM is monitoring, where data is collected from sensors, meters and management systems. Once collected, this data needs to be collated, normalized, analyzed and presented in an immediately understandable format. What’s more, as DC tasks increasingly move to service models, and cloud, infrastructure and hard/software changes in the data center need to be communicated to internal and external parties providing the service, instantly and in an error-proof, automated manner. Seamless, semi-automated processes need to be introduced which bridge traditional technology and management divides.

Making rack-based DC assets more visible

DCIM does more than provide alerts – it is essential to generating performance data which, in turn, can serve as the basis for improvements and enhancements and can be fed into a datacenter asset management tool. This centralized system can store detailed information about the physical equipment as well as operational and workflow data and, in many cases, track changes, such as deployment and movement of physical assets. Linking change management to asset management systems means information is always up to date. Manually managed infrastructure data typically has a 10% error rate* and 20-40% of ports in a network are forgotten over time**. Manual management also takes a great deal of staff time. An automated solution continuously monitors each connection in one or more data centers or local networks and a (remote) central server records the cabling status. This type of AIM-based solution offers functions for management, analysis and planning of cabling and network cabinets and can halve network monitoring and management costs. Updates are automatically generated when new devices are integrated or changes are made. Unused patch panels and ports in active equipment are immediately detected. Data can be traced in real time with a PC or smartphone, locating faulty connections within seconds.

Another important responsibility of datacenter managers is cabling and connectivity management. DCIM software solutions are already catering to this requirement, for example by using a software control layer to map and monitor cabling assets and physical connections in real time. This ‘intelligent physical layer management’ IPLM complements existing IT network management and monitoring products. Any disturbance or inefficiency can be found almost instantly and remedied. Audits also become significantly faster and easier, as does inventory maintenance.

Integrating cable management into DCIM improves uptime and enables fast, efficient reaction. It allows ‘drilling down’ to individual links between specific racks and other equipment, including switches, routers, firewalls and network devices. In DC infrastructure, cabling is often a key cost point, despite the fact that it is not as visible as hardware components. Proper connectivity management is essential to accommodating growth and offering flexibility. If cabling doesn’t seem to be working properly, having an extensive history of Moves, Adds and Changes can prevent extensive field research and testing.

This allows a more proactive approach to infrastructure management, showing up potential growth areas and difficulties. Problems and improvement areas can be examined and solutions proposed before they are actually physically carried out on site. You can visualize patch panel cable management from remote locations, for example. When selecting a cable management and documentation solution, it’s definitely worth checking whether it fits in with current or future DCIM requirements.

Keeping an eye on cabling

In short, an integrated DCIM solution incorporating cabling parameters offers automated, end-to-end, real-time, on-demand physical asset inventory and management for your data centers at the touch of a button. This can support your risk-mitigation, compliance, business, capacity planning and security needs whilst making error-prone, time consuming manual work obsolete. Audit that once required folders full of spreadsheets and took weeks to complete can now be performed in hours. Investments can typically be earned back in a year or so. Apart from drastically reducing the time spent on creating inventories, capacity is freed up to spend on core tasks, which actually contribute to the bottom line. Management reporting improves significantly, as does documentation on which strategic choices and hardware purchases are based.



* Source: Watson & Fulton
** Source: Frost & Sullivan