Data-driven insights for small and medium data centers

The new Data Center Hub monitoring software complements the Siemens portfolio for data centers, enabling effective operation of small to medium-sized colocation and enterprise data centers. Data Center Hub is a cloud-based application that provides live monitoring, automated analysis and advanced reporting of historical infrastructure performance data, using state of the art IoT connectivity and analytics. It combines and analyzes data from field devices and external information sources, for instance weather data, to provide actionable insights to all user roles. Data center facility and IT managers, as well as technical personnel and management get full visibility of key performance indicators such as power and cooling efficiency. Data Center Hub provides them with site transparency at any time and on any device – smartphone, tablet or PC – to better manage their operations.

"Data Center Hub is designed specifically to meet the needs of operators who manage multiple small and medium-sized data centers from multiple locations. We empower the operators with the situational awareness across all sites and detailed analysis of performance of individual sites" states Sabine Erlinghagen, Head of Digital Buildings at the Siemens Building Technologies Division. "User centric design was applied to ensure that Data Center Hub is an efficient, easy-to-use and powerful solution for these types of data centers".

The Web-based product is easy and fast to deploy, and it is offered as a scalable subscription model. Moreover, the offering is vendor-agnostic. As a result, the software can bundle data from different sources and types of equipment that often run side by side in data centers.

The analysis of the operating data collected reveals trends that can be used to optimize energy use, operations and costs as well as to deploy personnel resources efficiently. Other data analyses, like heatmaps, enable a swift response if an incident occurs and are useful for predictive maintenance. A clear dashboard structure provides users with at-a-glance information on the status of their site or multiple sites that are geographically distributed at any time. Additionally, notifications can be set by users and sent via text (SMS) or e-mail. Furthermore, Data Center Hub enables automated reporting, thus ensuring transparency and the fulfillment of SLAs between colocation data centers and their tenants.