RARITAN ADVERTORIAL
FOCUS on DCIM
360-Degree Management of Data Center Infrastructures
Data centers and IT labs must turn their attention to metering and monitoring their IT equipment racks in ways, and at a level of detail, they have not done so before. In this interview, Raritan Power SBU Director Herman Chan addresses data center infrastructure management (DCIM) at the rack and how deploying DCIM solutions can lead to optimal capacity planning, increased uptime, improved effi ciency and productivity and decreased costs.
What is DCIM and why is it critically important to data center managers? DCIM consists of six management areas: Asset, capacity, change, power, environment and energy. For Asset, it’s about what do I have, where is it located, and how is it connected to my infrastructure? For Capacity, it’s about how much space, power, cooling, and connectivity do I have? Where can I put new equipment? For Change, it’s about managing people’s work. Are there approval processes? How do I know the work is done correctly? For Power, it’s about how much do I have, can I get alerts before circuits fail, and can I find stranded power to avoid costly build outs? For Environment, it’s about knowing if I am overcooling and wasting energy. Are there hot spots? For Energy, it’s about who’s using it, how much does it cost, where can I save?
What is Raritan’s view and key recommendations for building out a DCIM plan? We believe data center managers don’t need to implement all the solutions at once. Rather, they should deploy now what will provide the greatest improvement or fix the most pressing problem, without a major rip and replace.
However, they should keep their options open to implement additional improvements in the future without undoing or redoing past fixes.
What makes Raritan’s solution different or superior to other offerings in the market? Our focus is on data center problems. The solutions for those problems include hardware and software. We want to make the implementation of new DCIM technology as easy as possible to buy, deploy, configure and maintain. That means software with rack-based pricing and delivering it as either a hardware or software appliance. Our software and hardware are standards based and open, so that they can work with other tools in the data center.
What kind of results are your customers seeing? We’re seeing customers who are now able to track and manage their IT assets easier with dcTrack software, others who have reduced energy costs significantly, and others who
have extended the life of their data centers by finding more capacity. DCIM is all about better managing all the resources in the data center. We have one customer who gutted and rebuilt a data center in the New York metro area. In the same space and power footprint, they’re able to get 10X the compute performance and operate with a PUE of 1.17 with almost 100% air side economization. They’ve implemented our PX intelligent rack PDUs along with environment and humidity sensors and Power IQ energy management software to help them know when to mix server exhaust air with outside air, when to turn on humidity or evaporative cooling, and as a last resort, when to turn on chillers. n
www.raritan.com/DCIM360
www.datacenterdynamics.com
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